Amazon's Confusing Machine Customer Strategy

Reminder: this post is my personal opinion. It is not the view of Gartner Inc.

In our book about Machine Customers, Don and I repeatedly point out the powerful position that Amazon holds, as a potential prime mover of this emerging megatrend. Both of us admire the company and are very impressed with the on-demand hardcover print Amazon KDP service, through which Gartner was able to become its own book publisher for the first time. However, in 2024 Amazon's machine customer strategy seems confounding. They do not appear to be seizing and scaling their advantage. It doesn't feel like the much vaunted Bezos 'day one' mentality is succeeding.

Here's why I am a little disappointed:

• Amazon dash shelf (in the image above) seems to no longer be available in the USA and never made it to other countries. Did it fail?
• Amazon dash replenishment services seem awfully quiet - I see barely any news flow, except for occasional mentions in articles about printers.
• A genAI upgraded Alexa, PR-previewed six months ago doesn't appear to have progressed to public release. Absence of a significant update about it at CES was noticeable.
• Instead this month there was a announcement about Rufus " "an expert shopping assistant trained on Amazon’s product catalog" that was released "in beta to a small subset of customers in Amazon’s mobile app". Rufus, by the way, was the name of a dog that is a famous part of Amazon's internal early days folklore. But why the animal allusion and what's the relationship of Rufus to Alexa? Why mobile - not voice commerce?
• Also this month Amazon's attempt to acquire iRobot was scrapped after a challenge by the EU regulator. Don and I could clearly see the high potential of this kind of sensor-enabled device to support predictive Machine Customer actions.

Count me confused. I don't think I'm seeing a coherent strategy being well executed. It all seems a bit sporadic and low reach. Am I expecting too much? Clearly, AI enabled capabilities that interpret needs and substitute human customer effort are not easy to build. But the contrast with the GenAI-related visible progress rates of OpenAI and Microsoft is kind of noticeable.

While Amazon seems to be a bit slow, others like Walmart, Keurig and part Peter Thiel funded DO NOT PAY seem to be making good machine customer progress. If you want your company to join them at the leading edge of this important change to business - may I suggest our book to you?