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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, in his celebrated 1997 shareholder letter famously wrote that it was "Day 1 for the Internet" and said Amazon had "a window of opportunity" while "customers, new to purchasing online, are receptive to forming new relationships."
CEO Andy Jassy referenced the same theme in his recent shareholder letter, with comments about the new relationships customers are forming with AI shopping assistants, and how every customer experience will be reinvented by AI.
While much of Jassy's letter, and the subsequent media and Wall Street reaction, focused on Amazon's big-money investments in AI, including expanding the AI infrastructure on its AWS cloud-computing platform, it also outlined how AI is creating a new Day 1 opportunity for shopping.
"If you believe that every customer experience will be reinvented in the coming years by AI, it means even the customer experiences that feel most comfy, and are most broadly adopted, will be reimagined," Jassy wrote.
"It's not hard to imagine with the emergence of AI, that the interface with which customers want to interact with a retailer could be substantially different over time," he wrote. "The temptation is to just add a little AI to the existing experience."
Building A New Brain For Alexa
But what Amazon is doing, and what all smart companies should be doing, according to Jassy, "is going back to the starting line and reimagining your experiences from a clean sheet of paper, assuming you were building with the new technology."
For Amazon., a key part of that strategy has been building a new brain for Alexa, the voice-controlled virtual assistant it launched in 2014.
Amazon began rolling out Alexa+, the upgraded Alexa for the AI age, to early access users in February, 2025 and made it available to the general public this March.
Alexa+ is designed to be able to engage in conversations that are far more nuanced and complex than the old Alexa could handle. It can also be set up to manage smart home connected lights, thermostats, or security cameras; make restaurant reservations on Open Table; place Amazon orders; alert you to deals you are interested in; arrange for food deliveries from GrubHub or Uber Eats; or suggest a recipe for dinner, translate the recipe into a list of ingredients, and order those ingredients from Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods.
Other AI chatbots and browsers are promising they can - or soon will be able to - do much of the same, but what gives Alexa+ a huge advantage in the race to be the best AI personal assistant is that it is backed by the ecommerce tools Amazon has been perfecting for the past 30 years.
Amazon's advances in super-fast delivery, and its expanding access to brands beyond its own products and its third-party sellers, with its new Shop Direct and Buy for Me tools, when combined with an AI assistant smart enough to recommend products, discover them, and make purchases instantly, have the potential to transform shopping.
All Amazon Prime Members get access to Alexa+ as part of their Prime membership. Non-members can access it for $19.99 a month.
An "Amplifier" of Prime Benefits
Jamil Ghani, Vice-President, Anazon Prime, describes Alexa+ as a tool that enhances all of the benefits that come with a Prime membership.
Alexa+, "is purpose built to get things done, and the best way to get things done is by using your other Prime benefits," Ghani said in an interview.
"I need to shop? I have Prime fast, free unlimited shipping and shopping benefits. I want to watch something? Alexa+ is there to help you use personalization to get you exactly to the piece of content you like. You want to listen to music? You want to start a grocery order? Alexa+ is that amplifier, that enabler, that sits across all of Prime's benefits," he said.
The previous version of Alexa was connected to 600 million "active endpoints" - Amazon Echo speakers, Fire TV, Prime Video and other devices, according to Jassy. Early statistics since Alexa+ was launched widely show the upgrade is increasing engagement - and boosting shopping.
Purchases Up 3x With Alexa+
With Alexa+, customers are talking to Alexa twice as much, and for longer times across a broader range of topics, and completing purchases on devices three times as often, according to Amazon statistics. They also have increased their use of smart home functions by 50% and are streaming music 25% more, according to Jassy.
Customers increase smart home usage rapidly after they switch from classic Alexa to Alexa+, Ghani said, with usage increasing an average of 20% during the first weeks. Existing Alexa Smart Home users who upgrade to Alexa+ increase their engagement by 26% in week one, and that jumps to 45% by week five, he said.
"Seventy-six percent of Alexa interactions are things that no other AI can do, because they're allowing you to take intent or desire and turn it into action," Ghani said, "One of the key ways customers are doing that is through shopping."
The shopping assistance Alexa+ provides compliments the Prime membership benefit of fast, free shipping, a benefit Amazon has been investing in to expand.
Amazon now can provide same day perishable grocery delivery to 2,300 cities and towns across the U.S. and is testing drone delivery that would enable even faster deliveries.
In 2025, Amazon delivered 8 billion items same day or next day in the United States, and half of those - 4 billion items - were grocery or every day essentials.
"We estimate that helps our members in the U.S. avoid 64 trips of strapping kids into the carseat, driving to the store, driving home," Ghani said. "That's 55 hours we estimate - real material savings."
Amazon also is accelerating plans to make one-hour and three-hour deliveries more widely available for a limited number of items where speed of delivery is essential.
Alexa+ has another edge over the other shopping assistants in development - it has the benefit of shopping insights Amazon has gained over the 30 years, and gets to share the knowledge gained by Amazon's AI-powered online shopping assistant, Rufus.
"Alexa+ taps into all the same knowledge that Amazon has about serving customers in a shopping context,"Ghani said.
He gave an example from his household that illustrates the potential of Alexa+. His daughter decided on a Friday that she wanted to cook a meal on Saturday, and searched for recipes on Alexa+.Alexa+ remembered she prefers vegetarian meals,and suggested recipes.With one command Ghani was able to put all of the items needed for the selected recipe in the families cart,completed the checkout,and the items were delivered Saturday morning.
"It's those kinds of seamless experiences,tied into shopping,that are the core of the new Alexa,"he said.