Amazon ‘dropped the ball’ with Alexa, former employee says

In his view, Amazon’s infrastructure was “agonizingly painful” for its developers because of guardrails put in place to protect user data. He added that computing resources to carry out experiments were limited.

Eric also claimed that progress on Alexa was hindered by a organizational structure that resulted in overlaps between teams that sometimes worked on similar challenges.

“This introduced an almost Darwinian flavor to org dynamics where teams scrambled to get their work done to avoid getting reorged and subsumed into a competing team,” he wrote.

According to Eric, the Alexa team had to “constantly justify” its existence to senior leaders, and there was a conflict between the product and science teams in weekly meetings. He said this led to a churn of managers every few months and the sunsetting of its efforts to make Alexa a multimodal agent in Amazon customers’ homes.

Eric also said that after OpenAI unveiled its multimodal GPT-4o model, which has a voice assistant called Sky, he received a message from a former Alexa colleague, who he says told him: “You’d think voice assistants would have been our forte at Alexa.”

Amazon and Eric didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.