Amazon shared an impressive vision for the future of “agents” on Wednesday. This is an improvement on the company’s Alexa, Alexa+, which handles countless mundane tasks, from booking a restaurant to finding an appliance repairman.
If Amazon can deliver, it could be your first gate with a comprehensive consumer-centric agent tool. The company hopes to marry something with a more natural and expressive AI model with the ability to utilize more autonomous, third-party apps, services and platforms in a completely autonomous and intelligent way.
“I believe the future is full of agents, and I’ve been believing this for a while,” Amazon Alexa and Echo VP Daniel Rausch said in a keynote address Wednesday. “A lot of AI agents are doing things for their customers. Many of them have specialized skills. And in a world full of AI, we have always believed that these agents need to interact with each other. They need to seamlessly interoperate for our customers.”
It would be a big win for the tech giants struggling to make the original assistant relevant again. For years, Amazon has invested in Alexa without any major income that demonstrates it. The company’s hardware division reportedly burned billions of dollars.
Agents are ambiguous and increasingly diluted terms that refer to AI models that allow users to take action on their behalf, and the next big thing in AI. The tech industry sees it as the key to extracting value from increasingly sophisticated models. Agents are committed to knocking out low variant chores and agenda items and keeping people and businesses.
At least that’s the idea. So far, agents have been largely overwhelmed.
Major AI labs, including Humanity and Openai, have launched agents that can control the browser to perform actions. However, they often make mistakes and require a considerable degree of intervention to accomplish more complex tasks. Other ambitious attempts with agents like Google’s Project Mariner will remain in the prototype stage without the release window being committed.
Amazon’s Demos of Alexa+ is set to be released in preview starting next month, depicting a more refined agent experience. The company has shown assistants extracting information from a variety of sources, including emails, calendars and stored preferences, to help with daily errands.
In one preview at New York Press on Wednesday morning, Amazon saw Alexa+ build a grocery shopping list and ordered items through integrations with Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods and other local chains. In another demo, the company highlighted how Alexa+ automatically purchases products on Amazon at the time of sale and book SPA and fitness appointments through the Wellness App Vagaro.
According to Amazon, the agent’s functionality doesn’t stop there. Alexa+ can place food delivery orders via Grubhub to praise Uber, find tickets for upcoming concerts on Ticketmaster, organize travel itineraries to sources such as Tripadvisor, extract key dates and times from event flyers to set reminders.
Is it too good to be true?
It all sounds very exciting – and ambitious. And Amazon is probably well positioned to succeed, given the long-standing data on retailer’s shopper habits and partnerships with key technology ecosystems and services. Users willing to fork Alexa+ data benefit from a more personalized, customized agent experience. It’s no coincidence that Alexa+ (usually priced at $19.99 a month) is free for Prime Subscriber, Amazon’s most dedicated user cohort.
Amazon also expects a huge Alexa installed with over 600 million devices (over 600 million devices) to jumpstart Alexa+ adoption. With Alexa-compatible speakers already in many homes, the company bets that Alexa+ is easy for many users.
Perhaps Amazon’s biggest challenge is overcoming the technical limitations of today’s AI technology. Alexa+ is reportedly repeatedly delayed due to model fraud. Previous versions of the experience didn’t answer the questions correctly and had a hard time turning off the smart light.
For nothing, the rival baby step towards the agent tool is struggling with his own set-up. ChatGpt Deep Research, Openai’s agent model for editing research reports, sometimes hallucinates. Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini chatbot spews out virtually wrong summary of email.
It was tough to feel how Alexa+ played at Wednesday’s press event. Many of the demonstrations were very choreographed and Amazon didn’t allow participants to use their new assistants for long periods of time.
You will need to wait for Alexa+ to be placed at that pace to know if you’re coming closer to meeting Amazon’s agent sales pitch. If so, it would certainly be a very impressive feat — and could give Amazon the lead in the consumer agent race.
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