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Seattle-based Amazon is doubling down on
AI for AWS and the ecosystem around its AI
assistant, Alexa. It’s seeking to become the
central provider for AI-as-a-service. But it’s not
leaving retail behind either, running grocery,
book, and convenience stores across the US.
Amazon is the exception to nearly every rule in business.
Rising from humble beginnings as a Seattle-based internet
bookstore, Amazon has grown into a propulsive force across at
least 5 major industries: retail, logistics, consumer technology,
cloud computing, and most recently, media & entertainment.
Notably, Amazon’s $13.7B purchase of grocery chain Whole
Foods last year shook up the grocery industry, highlighting
Amazon’s increasingly deep push into brick-and-mortar retail.
Of course, the company has had its share of missteps — the
expensive Fire phone fop comes to mind — but Amazon is also
rightly known for strokes of strategic genius that have launched it
ahead of competitors in promising new industries.
This was the case with the launch of cloud business AWS in the
mid-2000s, as well as the more recent consumer hit Amazon
found with its Echo device and Alexa AI assistant.
Today’s Amazon is far more than just an “everything store;” it’s a
leader in consumer-facing AI and enterprise cloud services. And
its insatiable appetite for new markets means competitors must
always be on guard against its next moves.
As the United States’ biggest online retailer, the company
accounts for about 4% of all retail and about 44% of all e-com-
merce spending in the US. While the company has been publicly
traded for more than two decades, its market capitalization has
swelled in recent years.Wall Street banks like Morgan Stanley expect Amazon to continue
growing at a rate that no company its size has ever done before,
estimating 16% average compound growth in sales through 2025.
Morgan Stanley analysts have also set a price target at $2,000/
share — or a market capitalization exceeding $1T — within the
year. If Amazon is able to satisfy these lofty goals, it will be “the
most aggressive expansion of a giant company in the history of
modern business.”
Understanding the many-headed beast that is Amazon is no easy
feat, especially because the company is so much less transparent
than many its peers. As the
New York Times
reports,
“[Amazon] isn’t just secretive, the way
Apple is, but in a deeper sense, Jeff
Bezos’ e-commerce and cloud-storage
giant is opaque. Amazon rarely explains
either its near-term tactical aims or its
long-term strategic vision. It values
surprise.”
In this report, we dive into that “opaque” strategic vision, from
Amazon’s investment and M&A history, to analysis of its patents,
to initiatives across AI, media, AWS, and more.Key takeaways
Given Amazon’s enormous breadth, we won’t be covering every
aspect of its business. But highlights from our analysis include:
Amazon is growing more acquisitive. Amazon acquired 10
startups in 2017 — more than any other year on record.
In addition to its purchase of Whole Foods, the company
bought Harvest.ai, a cybersecurity player, GameSparks, a game
development platform, and Blink, a developer of home security
cameras, while also expanding geographically with its acquisition
of Souq, a Middle Eastern e-commerce site.
This acquisition-heavy year, in comparison to the company’s
generally more conservative M&A history, could mean Amazon
is shifting to a more proactive stance to fuel its AI and enterprise
ambitions.
Amazon’s next pillar is AI. In a letter to shareholders published
in April 2017, Bezos wrote extensively about AI and machine
learning as a focus when it comes to the company’s efforts to
maintain its relevance and edge over its competition.
Voice, virtual assistants, and natural language processing will con-
tinue to be a focus for Amazon. But the company is also focused
on AI-as-a-service, putting the basic tools of AI in the hands of its
cloud computing and developer community. More than ever before,
Amazon is aspiring to become a platform company.
Amazon is going after healthcare. Its investment into cancer
detection company GRAIL was a vote of confdence in genomics,
which with its massive data and processing needs, will be a major
area for computing. In addition, Amazon’s recent partnership
with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to provide employees
with better health insurance signals broader ambitions to upend
traditional healthcare.
Amazon is proactively creating a valuable ecosystem around its
Alexa voice computing platform. Currently, the Alexa platform
offers software development kits (SDKs) that allow third-party
developers to build skills for the AI assistant and other manufactur-
ers of hardware to integrate the Alexa assistant into their products.。