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Amazon shared an impressive vision of an “agentic” future on Wednesday — one in which the company’s improved Alexa, Alexa+, handles countless mundane tasks, from booking restaurants to finding appliance repairmen.
If Amazon can deliver, it could be the first out to the gate with a comprehensive, consumer-focused agent tool. The company hopes to marry a more natural, expressive Alexa — one powered by generative AI models — with the ability to tap into first- and third-party apps, services, and platforms in a fully autonomous, intelligent way.
“We believe that the future is full of agents — we have believed this for some time,” Amazon Alexa and Echo VP Daniel Rausch said in a keynote Wednesday. “There will be many AI agents out there doing things for customers, many of them will have specialized skills … And we’ve also always believed that in a world full of AI, these agents should interact with each other. They should interoperate seamlessly for customers.”
That’d be a big win for a tech giant struggling to make its long-in-the-tooth assistant relevant again. Amazon has invested for years in Alexa without significant revenue to show for it; the company’s hardware division has reportedly burned through billions of dollars.
Agents, a nebulous and increasingly diluted term referring to AI models that can take actions on a user’s behalf, are the next big thing in AI. The tech industry sees agents as the key to extracting value from increasingly sophisticated models. Agents promise to knock out low-hanging chores and agenda items, boosting people’s — and businesses’ — overall productivity.
That’s the idea, at least. So far, agents have largely underwhelmed.
Major AI labs including Anthropic and OpenAI have launched agents that can take control of a browser to perform actions. But they often make mistakes, and require a fair degree of intervention to accomplish more involved tasks. Other ambitious attempts at agents, like Google’s Project Mariner, remain in the prototype stage, without committed release windows.
Amazon’s demos of Alexa+, which is scheduled to launch in preview starting next month, depicted a more polished agentic experience — one with few technical hurdles. The company showed the assistant extracting information from a range of sources, including emails, calendars, and stored preferences, to help with daily errands.
In one preview during a presser in New York on Wednesday morning, Amazon showed Alexa+ building a grocery shopping list, then ordering items via integrations with Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, and other local chains. In a separate demo, the company highlighted how Alexa+ can automatically purchase products on Amazon when they go on sale, and reserve spa and fitness appointments through wellness app Vagaro.
The agentic capabilities don’t stop there, according to Amazon. Alexa+ can place food delivery orders through GrubHub, hail an Uber, find tickets to upcoming concerts on Ticketmaster, put together a travel itinerary drawing on sources like Tripadvisor, and even extract key dates and times from an event flyer to set a reminder.
Too good to be true?
It all sounds very exciting — and ambitious. And Amazon is arguably well-positioned to succeed, given the retailer’s years of data on shopper habits and partnerships with major tech ecosystems and services. Alexa+ users willing to fork over their data stand to benefit from a more personalized, tailored agent experience. It’s no accident that Alexa+ — normally priced at $19.99 a month — will be free for Prime subscribers, Amazon’s most dedicated user cohort.
Amazon is also counting on its enormous Alexa installed base — over 600 million devices — to jumpstart Alexa+’s adoption. With an Alexa-compatible speaker already in many homes, the company’s wagering that Alexa+ will be a no-brainer for many users.
Perhaps Amazon’s biggest challenge will be overcoming the technical limitations of today’s AI tech. Alexa+ has reportedly been delayed repeatedly due to misbehaving models; earlier versions of the experience couldn’t answer questions correctly and struggled to turn smart lights off and on.
Not for nothing, rivals’ baby steps in the direction of agentic tools have suffered their own setbacks. ChatGPT deep research, OpenAI’s agentic model for compiling research reports, sometimes hallucinates. Google’s Gemini chatbot, meanwhile, spits out factually wrong summaries of emails.
It was tough to get a sense of how Alexa+ performed at Wednesday’s press event. Many of the demos were highly choreographed, and Amazon didn’t allow attendees to use the new assistant at length.
We’ll have to wait to put Alexa+ through its paces to know if it comes close to fulfilling Amazon’s agentic sales pitch. If it does, that’d be a very impressive feat indeed — and might just give Amazon the lead in the consumer agent race.
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