In surprising news, new reports suggest that Amazon is on track to release a new version of its Alexa voice assistant. In recent weeks, when Google announced its Gemini AI assistant, Apple previewed Siri 2.0, and OpenAI showed off GPT-4o, Amazon's competitors are being left behind by the shopping giant.

This is surprising considering that last year, Amazon showed off Alexa, which at the time was miles ahead of Google and Apple. Just this past January, Amazon had announced new generative AI skills for Alexa. Last month, a CNBC report suggested that the company wants to turn its voice assistant into a conversational chatbot.

However, according to a new Fortune report, Amazon is having an uphill battle integrating generative AI into Alexa. Fortune magazine charges a fee, but you can read the full lengthy report through Yahoo syndication.

The reasons for Amazon's inability to produce an updated Alexa appear to be myriad, but broadly speaking, according to Fortune, Amazon is "an organization plagued by structural dysfunction and technical challenges that have repeatedly delayed shipping Alexa with the new generative AI This is because "the company has repeatedly delayed the shipment of Alexa with the new generative AI," according to the report. Overall, the former employees paint a picture of a company that is hopelessly behind rivals Google, Microsoft, and Meta in the race to launch AI chatbots and agents and is faltering in its efforts to catch up.

The information in the Fortune report is drawn from interviews with several former employees who say dysfunctional organizations have squandered their chance to dominate AI. A simple example is that Chat-GPT took Amazon by surprise.

An Amazon spokesperson told Fortune that the data in this article is "outdated" and does not reflect the current state of Alexa. Note that hundreds of employees from the Alexa and Fire TV teams were reportedly laid off by The Verge in November 2023.

Besides the layoffs, former employees told Fortune that they quit because they didn't think Alexa was ready.

One reported problem is that Amazon does not seem to have any idea how to integrate what Alexa currently does with what the company wants Alexa to do; in a September demo, Scarlett Johansson said that before Sky voice was shut down A friendly, conversational voice assistant similar to the one OpenAI demonstrated at GPT-4o was shown.

Apparently, since that demo, Alexa LLM has actually struggled to understand conversational language. And customers actually understand how to talk to the assistant in the "Alexa language." One employee told Fortune, "We basically need to burn our bridges with the old Alexa AI model and pivot to only working on the new one."

Employees told Fortune that Amazon is not leveraging assets it actually owns, like Anthropic AI, which manufactures Claude LLM. Part of this is due to privacy concerns, and part is due to Amazon's lack of access to AI-specific chips like Apple's new M4 chip and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite. An Amazon spokesperson refuted both reports.

Modern tech companies like to use agile management methods, which can create huge teams that can silo each other. It requires a scrum leader who understands how to communicate product and team needs among team leaders. It sounds like Amazon's decentralized organization has no such communication.

One specific way this could affect Alexa is for the Amazon Home team to make changes to Alexa so that the assistant can help with everyday home tasks. Next comes the Music team, which makes adjustments to Alexa so that it can be used for music playback. With these separate teams making changes to Alexa, the program fails completely.

Wherever Alexa and AI are currently at Amazon, they are clearly behind the curve.

Co-Pilot and AI PCs are coming this summer, even if Microsoft is fumbling with the recall feature. Apple's new Apple Intelligence will be on the iPhone this fall, and Google has been gradually rolling out new Gemini AI features since they were announced at I/O 2024. And OpenAI is getting into everyone's bed.

Eventually, an updated Alexa LLM may be rolled out, but it seems to be more of a "could have been" case than a positive outlook for the future of AI assistants from a company that until recently led the way.

Amazon is lagging behind, and unless something changes soon, Alexa is going to be left in the dust.