Amazon’s Alexa Gen AI Launch Delays Hint At A Bigger Problem Facing The Company: What We Know

Google, Microsoft and even Apple have showcased their respective AI roadmap as they look to match or better OpenAI in this arena. But one name is still missing from gaining prominence and that is Amazon. The tech giant showed its skills and tech blitz at the Amazon Day event in September last year.

Since then, the company has very little to show for its early optimism. And reports claim Amazon seems to have lost that momentum as it internally looks to roll out a product laced with Gen AI and giving Alexa more tools than it ever had.

Alexa Gen AI Upgrade Delayed But Why

The September 2023 event showed us a conversational version of Alexa that should have rolled out to millions of Echo speakers from the company. But it’s almost 12 months since that big event was hosted by Amazon and still we don’t see any signs of the Gen AI Alexa avatar releasing to the public. Instead, Amazon seems to be going bold with a subscription charge to use its AI features.

But former Amazon employees quoted in the report here, suggest the company is already playing catch up to its rivals and internally it faces a confused strategy which has pushed the roll out multiple times already.

AI Data Not Matching The Best

Amazon’s struggle with its AI advancement has been largely pointed towards the lack of data and also the high-end computing system that are needed to run these large language models or LLMs. These two form the fulcrum of succeeding with AI models and Amazon doesn’t have either of them, which explains why the conversational Alexa hasn’t made the breakthrough.

Divided Focus

Amazon has a robust cloud business via AWS that competes with Microsoft Azure and other platforms. Amazon feels that having AI pushed through its enterprise network could give it a leg up over the competition. But even then it seems to have prioritised building AI tools into AWS and this seems to have sidelined the work on the Gen AI Alexa.

The company’s own AI impetus was instigated by OpenAI when ChatGPT was unveiled back in 2022. Almost two years since that day, Amazon is lagging behind with its ideas, planning and a strategy that is deserving of a company of this stature.