Alexa gets Gen AI: Will your customer relationships survive?
When Amazon first unveiled Alexa, they promised a future where voice would become our primary technology interface. That didn't quite happen, but many of us use the assistant daily to play music and set reminders. The tech is there - and it's listening - but the full potential has not been realized. Yet.
Reports from a limited-access event at their Virginia headquarters suggest Amazon are bringing the power of GenAI to Alexa, but also points to the potential for Amazon to get in between you and your customers.
I touched on these kinds of risks previously in my email:?B2C, B2AI, or both??- but in the context of this news, let's dive deeper into what a GenAI powered Alexa might mean.
Based on scattered reports of the live stream, Amazon appears to be developing an enhanced Alexa with:
More natural conversations:?The upcoming Alexa will likely support flowing dialogs without repeating the wake word for each command, with improved context awareness and faster responses – creating a more human-like interaction.
Advanced task capabilities:?Beyond basic commands, this upgrade should handle complex workflows by connecting smart home systems and managing multi-step processes through conversation.
Enhanced personalization: New capabilities would remember user preferences and offer proactive assistance tailored to individual habits and needs.
Transformed shopping experience: Most significant for businesses: conversational commerce that could fundamentally change how customers discover and purchase products through voice.
There's no question that GenAI has the potential to enable those kinds of capabilities, but as Ben Thompson noted when he commented on the story in the Sharp Tech?podcast?- they're going to have a tough time integrating the clunky-but-reliable rules-based Alexa with these new capabilities - while maintaining the best of both. Voice AI is hard to get right, as I explained in my email: Which Customer Service AI platform?:
If Amazon delivers even partially on these capabilities, the business implications are substantial:
Amazon's integration of generative AI into Alexa represents a big shift in the business-to-consumer landscape. While the full vision will take time to materialize, the direction is clear: AI-mediated interactions are becoming the new competitive battleground for customer relationships.
The question isn't whether this transition is happening, but how quickly – and whether your business strategy accounts for a world where the customer's primary relationship might be with an AI rather than directly with your brand.
Kerry Robinson is an Oxford physicist with a Master's in Artificial Intelligence. Kerry is a technologist, scientist, and lover of data with over 20 years of experience in conversational AI. He combines business, customer experience, and technical expertise to deliver IVR, voice, and chatbot strategy and keep Waterfield Tech buzzing.