Hey, I'm Lance Ulanoff, editor at large for TechRadar, and I'm here with Panos Panay, an old friend. Not old, but an old friend. Senior vice president.
It's okay. You can say it. I don't do 50 push-ups every day.
Senior vice president, devices and services for Amazon. So, how's it going?
It's going well. It's good to see you. Thank you for having me.
No, it's a pleasure to get to talk to you. It's been a little while. Just want to cover a few things because, you know, new job for you, but you're in control of a product that everybody's really looking at and interested and excited about. So, I'm actually going to start with asking a question that I ask myself now every day because I'm using the product. When is Alexa Plus going to go fully public?
Fully public. It's pretty soon. I mean, we're working up. So like one of the things just to think about is there's a balance of, you know, we have hundreds of millions of customers and we're being cautious because there's two things you think about. Starting from zero with AI, you know, you have Alexa Plus, new, conversational, smarter, helps you get things done, helps you control your home, manage your home, manage your list, manage your calendar. All these things are coming in. And when you start from zero from an AI front, makes sense. We have all our partners to bring along and to stay connected to. But when you have hundreds of millions of customers, they're not starting from zero. They're coming from what was Alexa to Alexa Plus. So, we're trying to be very cautious and making sure we really do work out every kink. It's what we call early access right now.
And so we're doing it in a very kind of methodical way, taking feedback, listening to customers. People are pumped about using it. It's fun. And every now and then I'm like, 'Turn it on, give it to everyone.' And then you're like, 'Ah, no.' Like, it's okay. There's, you know, we want to make sure we bring every customer along that we can. And so we've got feedback mechanisms. We're listening. It's pretty fun. There's not an exact date right now, Lance. It comes down to when the product is ready, we just open it. Now, keep in mind also like these are over-the-air updates, meaning we're updating products in their homes, in people's homes. So again, you want to do that very cautiously just from the perspective of you don't want to break it,
Just want to break it. You want them to, you know, want your customer to get an update, have a delightful transition and experience. So these are just, you know, you want to make sure you put the customer first. Like one of my favorite things about Amazon, customer obsession. Like what does a customer need? What does the customer need?
Which makes early access tricky because, you know, we're giving people a product that is, it's awesome. People love using it. But if you've been using the same product for 10 years, it's different.
Oh, it's very different. Yes.
I can tell you I've been having conversations with it. Like actual conversations. I started a conversation where I asked it about, do you know who Panos Panay is? Well, it turns out there's a music producer with your name.
That's my cousin. That's my first
And so that was, it was stuck on that. And I said, what about a guy at Amazon? And then it knew who I was talking about. And then from that point forward we actually had a, it was strange because we had a whole conversation about my job, why I knew you, that I was in the tech industry. It got a little weird because I started realizing I'm not actually talking to a friend, but obviously that's so different from the regular Echo, regular Alexa. But one thing I will say is that there is, it's clearly not fully baked. For example, I showed it a pair of shoes. Now, again, something I can't do with the old Alexa. I said, 'I want a pair of shoes just like this.' It said, 'Okay.' And I thought, 'This would be something Amazon would be really good at.' But what it came back with was a list of shoes that didn't look like it, including women's shoes. And I'm like, 'Look, you know who I am. You know who I'm talking to.' So, I was like, 'All right, this is not quite fully baked.' But I'm going to ask you a question about the caution you're taking, because you answered a question I was going to ask. So, great. We understand why you're being so cautious.
But I think we're in AI time, right? The concept of AI time is everything goes faster. Are you concerned that the caution you're taking is putting Amazon sort of behind the competition?
No. No. Because I mean, look, if people want it right now, they can ask for it and they get it and they use it and it comes with some semblance of understanding. It's early access, they get in, but they're also loving it. They're using it more. They're shopping with it more. Yeah, there's some few corner cases where the kinks are being worked out, but ultimately you see the engagement. And if you think about what we've done, we have this agentic experience that's connecting to thousands of our partners and you're able to do so much. So, while there is an age of AI and it's moving, it is moving lightning fast as are we with it. But there's this element of being able to do all the things that Alexa is doing now. Whether it's, you know, creating that list, taking it with you to the store, pulling it out, doing the shopping for you, ask for what you need and get it, manage your calendar, update the document, and, you know, Alexa reads it, then updates you back, and you can quiz yourself on these little things that are coming into play that just then connect to partners, whether it's ordering food or ordering an Uber. They are, that no one's doing that right now. So we have that and people are engaged with our product in totally new ways, Lance. It's astonishing to watch the usage patterns that are on it. And so we feel good about that. Now when do we get it to the hundreds of millions, right? You know, this is like, it's just a process to ramp up. Millions of people have it now. Millions. And so it's not small. It's not the hundreds of millions. That's the entire Alexa base worldwide. But we're focused on the US first and we just got to get that right.
And you're kind of training, you're training a user base who has spent a decade using Alexa and their Echo devices in a very sort of simple way. And I realize with Alexa Plus you are transforming into a real 80/20 product and that 80% of people using 20% of the capability of this really rich thing. I'm seeing it all the time as I'm using it. I'm like, 'Oh, there's just more.' I keep asking it like, 'What can we do together?' So,
sounds like you're developing a relationship with it.
Yeah, a little bit. I'm curious about, you know, obviously, you know, you spent a lot of time at Microsoft, a long time at Microsoft, and for that place, the world sort of revolved around the platform of Windows, right? So, with Amazon, it revolves primarily around commerce. But what I'm curious about is if you envision the wheel of Amazon's products and services eventually revolving around the focal point of Alexa Plus.
Think about Alexa in your home and being ambient. It's quite powerful, that thought. Meaning you and I having a conversation. We can turn to Alexa and just have a conversation. We don't take our phone. We don't hit power. We don't open the app. We don't nothing. We just have a conversation. We can bring her in. Help us resolve. By the way, at my house, we're having debates all the time. And you're like, 'Oh, let's, you know, just ask Alexa. Let's get through it.' And this helps because nobody at the dinner table pulls out their phone and then gets distracted and then starts texting and like, 'What are you doing?' when we were having a conversation. Like this magical moment where the family stays a little more connected. But there's a nuance in there, like think about the services also that are there and ready to use. You can call any song in the world and play it. My brother and I were having a debate on what this latest OneRepublic song was and we were trying to get through it and finally we just asked Alexa, 'Do you remember this song and this movie?' And she found it, played it, and we were like, okay. But you have the music service, you have the Prime Video service, you have shopping. They all, to your question, they all hang around this service that's Alexa. And yes, of course, it's at the center of serving so many different customers on what they need and connected directly into those Amazon properties.
You guys right now have it working with the screen Echo, right?
Echo Show 8, 10, 15, 21, right? So many millions of people have. I mean, actually I still own the original Echo. Is there any sense of having a form of Alexa Plus working across every device that was sold?
There's so many different things you can do with the screen. However, you don't need a screen and it will work on most generations of Echo. Now there's some very early generations like it won't work on all of them, but almost all of them. You don't need a screen. If you have Echo in your device and you are a Prime member, you're going to get Alexa Plus and you can be conversational, you can set up your routines. It's powerful in all stances, screen or no screen, but, you know, with the screen, I think it's a better experience.
I want to switch gears a little bit just to talk about hardware and some of, you know, as I see the sort of world of Amazon hardware, there's some stuff that's kind of well-known. You have the Fire TVs, you have the Kindles, the sticks, and then you have things like all the essentials, right? All the sort of stuff that people buy like the switches and all that.
Yep. We also have Ring, Blink.
Right. Right. And so, but they're sub-brands or brands that some people don't even realize they're directly connected to Amazon, but Amazon hardware doesn't necessarily have the cachet of say an Apple, right? Like some of the hardware people get all excited about, you know, the next phone or whatever. I mean, is there any intention to sort of elevate the Amazon hardware brand to that level of excitement? And in a way, this connects a little bit to the conversations we had back in your days at Microsoft where you almost single-handedly elevated a portion of Microsoft's hardware business. So, I'm just curious about what your intention might be here at Amazon.
Okay. So we've had these conversations in the past where I'll never tell you what the future product is. Look, at the end of the day, I think we have something magical coming together with these products and literally the way they're interoperating. The fact that we have Alexa as an AI thread through all of them and how they connect. And yeah, I think also in elevating what people, you know, something that they buy that they covet, that's precious to them and how important that is. Like these are objects and they matter. You know, buying something that you love and that you want to use. That's a combination of both the aesthetics, the fit, finish, materials, how well it works, the quality of the product, but also how well it works with the other properties in your house or the other objects in your house that are so important to you. And I think you'll see a little elevation. You know, you have a very motivated team right now to deliver Alexa Plus throughout everything that we're building. And then as you watch these devices connect, like if you're using your Ring cameras now, you can use them basically as a virtual security guard to your home, just talk to Alexa. 'Show me what's happening outside. Did the dog go out?'
I've done it. I've done it. 'Show me how many times the dogs have been peeing on my lawn.'
