Well, I will say this. We're not going to talk about Star Wars necessarily, but we are going to talk about bots that are good at banter. All right. Your own version of C-3PO is Alexa Plus. And I would say it is probably one of the successes. You've been in your role since very late end of 2023, if I'm not mistaken.
You know, I'm not necessarily keeping track at this point, but I think... Okay, why?
And Alexa Plus was something that we'd been kind of anticipating for a while. I think this is one of your first successes in the role that you're in, because I use it every day. I find it to be very helpful when it needs to be. It's not overly intrusive or overly eager necessarily. And I get into very deep conversations about Hall & Oates, the history of the East India Company. You know, we've run the gamut. It's basically...
the Hall & Oates relationship when you do that? Because there's some challenges there. That is a rough relationship. So, anyway, let's talk about Alexa Plus. It's in tens of millions of homes.
And the feedback tends to be positive, yes? Not just me.
Yeah, I think it's interesting. Like there's feedback. There's all kinds of feedback. There's a balance. And you always have to be listening. It's a big deal. Like you got to be listening to your customer. You have to be listening to your customer, for sure, but it's not always what's being asked for is what the customer needs. Sometimes you know what's coming next, and you're kind of balancing it. But yes, we get a lot of feedback. It's quite positive. We've launched now. We're in six countries, including the US, obviously, which is where we started. So, you're starting to see the global presence happen with Alexa.
One measure, I would say, is you get customer feedback, but maybe a more important way of listening is usage. Like how people use the product. Does that make sense? So, it's not just what you're hearing, but how they're using it. Here's a measure of product success for me. It's usage intensity. You can tell, like in my history, I've seen this quite a bit. When you're using a product, when your customer's using your product, it's always got a spike the first day, always. You know, you have a Ubi or you're taking it out of the box, people are using it, they're discovering, and if you've done your job well, they discover, they find. And as they're using it, you see motion and energy, and if you have a good product, the usage is going like this over time. If you have an average product, the usage goes up and then plateaus. And if you have a product that's not going to make it, you know, within 45 days you know, because usage goes up, plateaus, and then you just start seeing how maybe it's not sticky.
With Alexa Plus, we're seeing this trend. It's awesome. People are using it, you know, they're chatting with it twice as much as they used to with Alexa. New customers are shopping, they're discovering routines, they're finding reminders. It's part of everyday life, but what really matters is somewhere in the middle of 45 days intensity on Alexa Plus starts going up.
Wow. It's rad. So, you have something now that's sticking. They're getting a feel for it. They're starting to have more courage in asking it questions.
It's what it is. Yeah, there's a lot of chit-chat, a ton. There's a lot of kind of info discovery. You're seeing people, like take my household, the phones stay in the pocket during dinner. We have a rule that you're not allowed to use the phone. It doesn't work. Because what happens is, it didn't work two years ago. We'd have these debates at the table. I have four kids, a 16-year-old who knows everything. She's amazing, and a 26-year-old who knows everything, and he's back home. So, the debates are pretty awesome. But what ends up happening is, two years ago, you'd be in a debate, we didn't have a phone at the table, but the debate would have gotten like a question was being asked, you didn't know the answer. What do you do? Like, what do you all do? You're like, it's the first thing you do. What's the first thing that happens when you take out your phone? You look at your notifications. You might log in, but for me, like, then that's an excuse for basically, well, he'll take out his phone now because I got my phone out. So, we have the social permission that we've given each other. Then it's a phone fest.
Right now at the dinner table, just to that usage pattern, it's become part of life. So, you just ask Alexa, and she's at the dinner table with you. Yeah. It's quite powerful because now you're not lost, you're not in your texts, you're not disengaging, your head's not down, your head's up.
So, you've gone from Alexa as a utility to Alexa as kind of a relationship, right? Is that kind of how you see it? It's still providing all the functions it did before, but now you're building more of a connection.
Yeah, I think you're building more of a connection, but I like thinking of it more as an assistant. I'm less interested in the relationship, I'm more interested in the usefulness. And I think Alexa was a great product in many ways, but it was anchored on very simple tasks, and very simple what I would call point and shoot, and then get an answer back. I think now you're just into, you know, it's almost platform level where you can ask it anything, you can get any answer you want. But then you're actually getting stuff done. You want it to be your assistant. So, it's changed for sure, that relationship.
We've done a number of stories at the Journal about AI psychosis, about how people form these intense relationships with their chatbots, and in rare but very tragic occasions it ends in a death. Sometimes, often, the cases that we reported have been mostly suicides, but there was even one homicide. Not to make light of that, but I don't know of anyone who's wanted to marry Alexa Plus, right? I don't think we're in that territory. We haven't reported anything. I guess what I'm asking though is, from a design perspective, what is the conversation around this potential threat and what do you implement to keep that threat from surfacing?
So we, you know, you take it as well, the discussions are always customer trust. We start there. One of the most powerful parts of Amazon is what we call our leadership principles, and then you drive. Maybe the top principle for me is customer obsession. I have this amazing team. Everything's anchored in the customer, but it's one thing focused on customer obsession, like what do they need, where are they going, what do you need to invent, and no better place to invent something than Amazon. But it's also customer obsession includes this baseline of trust. Trust comes from safety and security. And then also usage, like your product can't break. But we spend a ton of time on safety. We have 10 years in this space. We don't take it lightly. Our guardrails are, I would say, tight but reasonable. If you've used Alexa Plus, you can pretty much have any conversation you want, but there's a place where we start narrowing in. We bring safety to the forefront. We have an incredible leader that runs safety for us. She's a dynamic thinker, has been doing it for years, so the protections have been in place since day one. So, we're not novices in this area. I think we've been lucky. We've been rated very high when it comes to safety and conversations. We then have child protection, which is probably my most precious thing. And we have Alexa for Kids, which is really important. And parents who take it seriously, they get the benefits of that.
So, where are you looking? What areas specifically are you looking for Alexa Plus to grow in the next, say, 6 to 18 months?
You know, here's what we're finding. Think about the analogy I use, we use as a team, is what would somebody... Not everybody has a personal assistant. But if you did have one, like what would you want? And then how do you get the best out of your personal assistant? And one of the things is how much information can you give her? Like how much information does your personal assistant need to be effective for you? So, I think in the next 6 to 18 months it's about how proactive Alexa starts to get, how it understands your behaviors, what you need, what's the next step, how it gets more done for you. There's a real world where, you know, the more information you give Alexa, the more benefit you get coming back. So, different than creating some personal relationship, but more taking, how do I make this product more useful for me?
And we're seeing it for real. Like if right now, if you took this, you uploaded it, say, 'Give me your opinion.' You literally can take a video, you can take a sound bite, you can take a document, share it with Alexa, you give whatever information about yourself to Alexa, and the more Alexa learns about you, the more powerful the product gets to support you. And we're starting to see that from the movies you're watching, the books you're reading, the conversations you're having, that's between you and Alexa. And all these privacy measures are in place, but in six months from now, that relationship so to speak is not a personal relationship, it's a relationship of understanding. So now Alexa can predict what you need next, give you your daily routines, check you in the morning, just here's what you need, here's what your calendar looks like, here's what's happening next. Did you want me to take the next step for you? Do you want me to send the mail? Do you want me to send the text? So you're starting to see that come to life with Alexa, and you're seeing it in this incredible ambient way in the home. So six months from now, there's just this connection between you and your home, which is essentially Alexa, and then, you know, getting your day started and complete.
We'll come back to privacy in a second, but first I wanted to know your boss, Andy Jassy. I think it's always dangerous when you start with... He's one of the smartest CEOs I've ever met. Very shrewd guy. This business, as you all know, Amazon is an octopus of enterprises, and he's so sharp on all of that. And I know one of the things that happened when you were coming in, your predecessor, Dave Limp, well respected, we always enjoyed him.
Yeah, super guy, and now he's at Blue Origin, right? And one of the things though that we did report about the division under Dave was that it was losing money. I think we said tens of billions over the course of 2017 to 2021-ish, before your time. I'm not going to ask you to pull up a balance sheet or anything, but I am asking what are the conversations with you and Andy and the team about what the role of this division is in building audience, serving customers, and making money?
