David Limp, senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon.com Inc., introduces the Amazon Echo Dot smart speaker during a launch event at the company’s Spheres headquarters in Seattle, Washington, USA. on Thursday, September 20, 2018.
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Amazon hasn’t given up on its Alexa voice assistant, hardware chief Dave Limp said on Friday, even though the team behind the technology has been the primary target of the biggest layoff in the company’s history.
Amazon last year began laying off employees in the company’s workforce as part of CEO Andy Jassy. broader move to cut costs amid a worsening economic outlook and slowing revenue growth. The company’s equipment and services organization, which oversees the development of products such as Alexa, Echo smart speakers, and Kindle e-readers, is in number affected groups.
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He told CNBC that nearly 2,000 people in Limp’s division have been laid off due to job cuts. Jon Fort in an interview on Test technology.
This week, Jassy said the company set goals remove more than 18,000 roles, mainly in its stores and personnel organization. Previously, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC that 10,000 employees will be cut, but note that this number is flexible and subject to change.
In addition to layoffs, Amazon has also frozen new hires in the company’s workforce and shut down some of its more experimental projects, such as telehealth and devices. Video calling for kids.
“What we did was look at projects where perhaps, in this uncertain state, the risk reward for those projects and what they might bring to the client is not complete,” says Limp. all there. “Part of it is with Alexa, part of it is with other parts of my organization.”
However, Amazon remains “fully committed” to the Alexa unit even though the company is taking steps to be more disciplined at the cost in “a very uncertain economy,” Limp said.
“There are still thousands upon thousands of people working on this project,” said Limp from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “It’s a big project.”
Since its launch in 2014, Amazon has invested heavily in Alexa and appointed top talent to develop the technology, largely at the direction of Jeff Bezos, who first introduced Alexa and strongly believes in it. voice will play an important role in how people interact with computers in the future. At one point, Amazon there are 5,000 people works on Alexa and Echo.
Amazon sold devices like the Echo at or near their original price because their goal wasn’t to make money off of them. Instead, the company sees them as a means to bring customers into the broader Amazon ecosystem, where they’ll buy something from amazon.com or its other sites.
Limp rejects the idea that Amazon may have to raise prices significantly as it takes a closer look at costs. The prices of some items used in Amazon devices, such as memory and displays, have gone up, he said, and these items can be shipped to consumers. But overall Amazon’s hardware business model remains the same, Limp said.
“We try to sell our products at breakeven, sometimes a little bit higher,” says Limp. “Then when customers use them, let’s say they shop from their Alexa, that benefits Amazon as a whole and gives customers a great shopping experience, and that’s how we want to monetize these in the future.”
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