Tech

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sees an opportunity to deliver ads to users during their conversations with the company’s AI-powered digital assistant, Alexa+, he said during Amazon’s second-quarter earnings call Thursday.

“People are excited about the devices that they can buy from us that has Alexa+ enabled in it. People do a lot of shopping [with Alexa+]; it’s a delightful shopping experience that will keep getting better,” said Jassy on the call with investors and Wall Street analysts. “I think over time, there will be opportunities, as people are engaging in more multi-turn conversations, to have advertising play a role to help people find discovery, and also as a lever to drive revenue.”

Amazon says it has rolled out Alexa+ to millions of customers, part of an effort to make its legacy digital assistant capable of agentic behaviors and more natural to talk to. Alexa+ is Amazon’s answer to generative AI voice assistants from OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity that have made legacy systems feel outdated. However, the business models behind generative AI products remain unclear.