Dive Brief:
- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stressed the importance of generative AI in revolutionizing customer experience in his annual letter to shareholders Thursday.
- Amazon is building more than 1,000 generative AI applications across the business to improve CX, Jassy said. That includes implementing it in personal assistants, shopping experiences and home devices.
- “Generative AI is going to reinvent virtually every customer experience we know, and enable altogether new ones about which we’ve only fantasized,” Jassy wrote.
Dive Insight:
While businesses have woven AI into backend operations, more companies are deploying the technology directly to the customer and across a wide range of industries. Amazon is positioning itself to lead the charge.
“The early AI workloads being deployed focus on productivity and cost avoidance (e.g. customer service, business process orchestration, workflow, translation, etc.),” Jassy said. “Increasingly, you’ll see AI change the norms in coding, search, shopping, personal assistants, primary care, cancer and drug research, biology, robotics, space, financial services, neighborhood networks — everything.”
While many of these use cases are in their infancy, exploring and deploying generative AI is critical to stay competitive, Jassy said.
“But, if your customer experiences aren’t planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive,” he said. “How soon? It won’t all happen in a year or two, but, it won’t take ten either. It’s moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen.”
Earlier this month, Amazon launched Buy for Me, an agentic AI feature that can buy items from third-party sites through the Amazon Shopping app. And at the end of March, it launched Interests, an AI-powered tool that takes shopping prompts to routinely recommend items. While both are in pilot phases, they promise to improve the shopping experience.
In February, the company unveiled the new Alexa+, upgraded with generative AI and to be rolled out widely in the coming months. In his letter, Jassy said “a great personal assistant can answer virtually any question and get things done on your behalf.”
Alexa+ is the first two to do both, he said, making it a game-changer for consumers.
“She can play music, play video, move media from one of your devices to another, set alarms and timers, control your smart home, order across hundreds of millions of ecommerce items, make reservations for restaurants or Ubers, order concert tickets, alert you when your favorite artist announces a tour, find a plumber to fix your sink, and memorize whatever you’ve done on Amazon,” Jassy said.
