Amazon announced Friday that it is cutting jobs at its Alexa voice assistant unit, citing changes in business priorities and an increased focus on generative artificial intelligence.
The cuts affect several hundred employees who work at Alexa, according to the email. A spokeswoman declined to give further details on exactly how many were affected.
“We’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities and what we know is most important to customers, including maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI,” said Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Fire. TV, he said in the email. “These changes are leading us to suspend some initiatives.”
Amazon has been pulling back in a variety of divisions this month, including its music and gaming divisions and some human resources functions.
While most of the affected jobs were in the devices division, some worked on Alexa-related products in a different unit, a spokeswoman said. Many companies are shifting resources to generative AI, which can create software code and long text responses from short prompts.
Alexa is a voice assistant that can be used to set timers, perform search queries, play music, or as a home automation hub.
Reuters reported in September that morale in the devices division had been hit by concerns about what some saw as a weak product pipeline. In particular, people familiar with the matter pointed out that the Alexa voice assistant, now almost a decade old, has failed to keep pace in the era of generative artificial intelligence.
Amazon said at the time that “suggesting that a few anecdotes paint a picture of the reality of an organization as large and diverse as Devices and Services is inaccurate” and that it defended its products.
Amazon has said that its devices and services business is not profitable, without providing figures.
Just last month, the devices unit got a new boss, Panos Panay, who joined the company from Microsoft, replacing David Limp, a 13-year veteran who will leave at the end of this year to run the device company. Blue Origin rockets from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Panay had overseen the development of the Surface tablet.
Amazon has struggled to make a profit with Alexa, which many people use through Echo speakers or video screens. Most efforts to make money from it have focused on making shopping on Amazon.com easier.
The Seattle-based online retailer’s voice assistant products compete with offerings from Alphabet and Apple.
Amazon has cut more than 27,000 jobs companywide over the past year, part of a wave of tech layoffs in the United States after the industry hired large numbers of people during the pandemic.
The latest cuts come even as Amazon reported third-quarter net income that far exceeded analyst estimates and forecast revenue in the final quarter of the year roughly in line with expectations. The fourth quarter is the most crucial for Amazon as it includes holiday shopping.
In the email, Rausch said he remained optimistic about Alexa.
“Incorporating a new broad language model into voice-enabled personal AI has been and remains an enormous scientific and engineering challenge,” he wrote, using another term for generative AI.
