Alexa! Can this Amazon executive make you cool again?

Mint

5 hours ago

'And it actually played," he says, hands on his knees, leaning into the audience of reporters and analysts at Amazon.com's February demonstration of Alexa+, a rebooted, AI-infused version of the virtual assistant. 'Sounds kind of funny right now, but 10 years ago, it was mind-blowing."
During that first encounter with Alexa, Panay was working for Microsoft, developing Surface tablets and laptops that earned a cultlike following. Now, he is a year and a half into overseeing Amazon's devices and services—including Alexa, which hasn't changed much in the past decade, even as the tech world has been upended by advances like ChatGPT.
After releasing Alexa to widespread acclaim in 2015, Amazon had a head start getting people to engage with AI. But users still primarily ask the voice assistant for things like timers and the weather. Alexa and the devices unit have become a multibillion-dollar drag on Amazon's bottom line, a reminder of how a company known for its limitless expansionary ambitions failed to win at the next big thing.
For years, the devices unit unveiled a flurry of products like a house drone, a fitness wristband and a smartphone to see what might land with consumers. Alexa was integrated into microwaves, refrigerators and even eyeglasses.
Panay has scaled back the number of launches, focusing instead on ensuring that products like Alexa+ are functioning perfectly before rolling out to roughly 600 million devices.
'I believe simple is always better," Panay, 52, said in an interview. 'Anything you buy from Amazon, you will not only fall in love with, but it's also going to be that much easier to use."
Amazon has repeatedly delayed the full release of its smarter Alexa since first showcasing a version in September 2023. In early tests, as generative-AI capabilities were added, it became less reliable for existing tasks like turning on the lights. Responses were too often jumbled or took too long. The company says Alexa+ will be available as an optional software update this summer to most, if not all, customers, though it hasn't announced a specific date.
According to the company, the new version of Alexa—which Panay refers to as 'she," a rarity even among employees—will be able to arrange personal calendar events, play the music you want based on a vague description and remember dietary preferences for at-home meals. Alexa will be conversational, able to talk about major sporting events like a human friend, and capable of contacting and scheduling a contractor for house repairs, Amazon says.
Panay joined Amazon in October 2023 and inherited some of the delays, but he has also held up its wider release until he is satisfied that Alexa+ will work flawlessly, conversationally and with limited lag time, people familiar with the matter say.
He is often testing it out at home and reporting bugs. In one meeting last year, he told staff that he and one of his daughters had prompted Alexa+ to play a top-50 song with only context clues, but Alexa couldn't find the song. He told his team that Alexa+ had to be better at helping people find what they were looking for.
Panay built his reputation at Microsoft, where he was known as the 'godfather" of the Surface devices and oversaw Windows. He was instrumental in the popular, minimalist aesthetics of the Surface tablet and was known to ask company engineers about numerous small details.
Surface products weren't an immediate success. In 2013, Microsoft took a $900 million charge related to its struggling Surface RT tablet before the Surface Pro 3 became a hit. Panay became the effusive onstage showman, cultivating product launches akin to Apple's. On stage, and most days, he wears all black to simplify his wardrobe decisions and adorns his outfits with gold bracelets or rings, and sometimes flashy Nike sneakers.
Panos Panay, shown here in 2017, was well-known for his Surface product launch events at Microsoft.
At Microsoft, Panay hosted his friend and comedian Trevor Noah, who's known for his interest in technology, more than once. In 2019, Noah posted on Instagram a photo of himself with Panay in a Microsoft lab, saying he'd asked the executive for 'extra features and free Xbox games."
Panay spent weeks preparing for his presentations at Microsoft, said Ryan Day, who worked on the Surface's public-relations team. Panay would ask every team member how they thought a product's story should be told, and he pulled engineers to the side to ask how the hinges on devices would work or to figure out exact dimensions that would entice customers.
'He was obsessed with the mechanics of physical products," Day said. 'He never got up there and winged it."
Panay left Microsoft after more than 19 years to join Amazon, where he took over a sprawling division that includes everything from the Kindle e-reader to the Zoox autonomous vehicle and the Project Kuiper satellite-internet business, meant to compete with Elon Musk's Starlink.
He knows that getting Alexa+ right is critical because it will release to millions of people who depend on the technology across multiple devices. It's a very public rollout.
Some new features, such as certain personalized reminders and routines for family members, grocery ordering, creating personalized music, and third-party services like food ordering through Grubhub, haven't been available for early testers.
An Amazon spokesman said that nearly 90% of the Alexa+ features that the company announced are available for early users, though it isn't clear how big that group is. The spokesman said that the rest of the features will be available this summer.
Teams have demonstrated Alexa+ to Panay every few weeks. At one internal demo late last year, the assistant accidentally duplicated items in a shopping cart for a recipe. It also would default to recommending bananas to everyone since those are one of the most popular grocery items on Amazon.
Panay insists that all of Alexa's problems must be ironed out before the release.
'He really has us putting our back into 'Let's be a world-class consumer electronics company,'" said Daniel Rausch, Amazon's vice president of Alexa and Echo, who reports to Panay.
Last year, Panay noticed that the Echo Show visual display with Alexa+ had some screens with an easy-to-spot 'back" button but other screens where he had to swipe to go back. He told staff to make the function consistent, saying other, non-Amazon devices had such consistency.
Panay—not to be confused with his cousin, Panos A. Panay, the president of the Recording Academy, which organizes the Grammy Awards—was born in the Los Angeles area and is of Cypriot-Greek descent. He grew up in Burbank, Calif., and received a bachelor's degree from California State University, Northridge, and a master's in business from Pepperdine University. Early in his career, he worked at NMB Technologies, where he helped develop products such as keyboards and speakers. He now lives in the Seattle area.
Each day, the married father of four wakes up at 4:15 a.m. to journal, typically writing personal memos about the products he and his team are working on. Lately, he says he's learning from 'Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor known for his ideas on Stoicism.
'You can't always be beating yourself up," he said. Philosophical works are 'where I can always be learning and not judging, just trying to be myself at the end of the day."
Amazon's original financial strategy was to sell underpriced Echo speakers enabled with Alexa in hopes of getting people to spend more throughout the Amazon ecosystem. It didn't work, and the Amazon devices unit, dragged down by the financial performance of Echo, has overall been a money loser.
It became clear that it wasn't going to be profitable alone, which is why the company is now tying Alexa+ to Prime, said a person familiar with the matter. Alexa+ will be included with an Amazon Prime membership, which costs $14.99 a month, or as a separate $19.99-a-month subscription.