Why AI is Amazon’s competitive edge

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Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos addresses the audience during a keynote session at the Amazon Re:MARS conference on robotics and artificial intelligence at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada on June 6, 2019. (Photo by Mark RALSTON / AFP)        (Photo credit should read MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos addresses the audience during a keynote session at the Amazon re: MARS conference on robotics and artificial intelligence at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada on June 6, 2019. Source: MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images\

Artificial intelligence is transforming everything from agriculture to transportation, but for Amazon (AMZN), it’s become the key technology for advancing the company’s agenda across virtually all fronts, including e-commerce, hardware, and order delivery.

At Amazon’s re: MARS conference in Las Vegas this week, the Seattle tech giant announced advancements in AI, including drones that could be delivering packages “within months,” a new warehouse robot called the Pegasus Drive, the ability for Alexa to ask follow-up questions and perform multiple skills, and StyleSnap, an AI feature that lets users take a photo of clothing they like and find similar items to buy in Amazon's app. And although it wasn’t the case a decade ago, Amazon is widely considered by many to be at the forefront of AI innovation.

“We really do believe we can solve the most interesting and challenging problems facing us today using AI,” said Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services during his keynote on Tuesday.

Catching up on AI

It wasn’t always that way for Amazon. According to a Wired story from February 2018, Amazon’s push into AI in the early part of this decade involved an aggressive company-wide effort, tasking every team leader at Amazon with embedding AI technologies such as machine learning, computer vision and speech recognition into their respective businesses.

“It’s an arms race in AI between Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google, especially in the enterprise, but Amazon is really taking AI and spreading it across its whole ecosystem,” says Wedbush managing director Dan Ives.

AI can be found across nearly all of Amazon’s products and services, from Amazon.com homepage recommendations, which offer items to buy based on users’ browsing habits and purchases, to the company’s Amazon Go stores. The cashier-free stories deploy a combination of cameras, computer vision, and machine learning to track shoppers, so they can grab what they want and go without having to stop and pay like they would in traditional retail stores.

But it’s Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant that has become the Seattle tech giant’s most obvious example of AI. Since the Seattle tech giant introduced the first Amazon Echo speaker in 2015, Alexa has become a dominant force.

SEATTLE, WA - SEPTEMBER 20: An assortment of newly launched devices, including, an 'Echo Input,' 'Echo Show, 'Echo Plus,' 'Echo Sub,' 'Echo Auto' and 'Firetv Recast' are pictured at Amazon Headquarters, follownig a launch event, on September 20, 2018 in Seattle Washington. Amazon launched more than 70 Alexa-enable products during the event. (Photo by Stephen Brashear/Getty Images)
Amazon's Alexa-enabled speakers have become a dominant force. Source: Stephen Brashear/Getty Images

“With Echo, they’ve dominated the home speaker market, and that’s something that Google and Apple has aggressively gone after but to little success relative to what Amazon has done,” Ives added.

Nearly 72% of all smart speaker owners in the U.S. owned an Alexa-enabled Amazon Echo, according to a survey conducted by voice applications platform Voicify, which polled 1,038 adults in the U.S. in January 2019.