On Tuesday morning, Panos Panay didn’t look like a man under intense pressure. Or maybe he’s just good at hiding it.
Panay, the former chief product officer of Microsoft, joined Amazon last October as the head of its gadgets and services division, including Alexa. As a result, his most pressing task since day one has been to help lead a reinvention of the 10-year-old voice assistant for the new generative AI age.
One year later, though, and neither Panay nor any other Amazon executive has yet revealed the new Alexa to the public. Fortune previously reported that the new Alexa initiative, first announced by Panay’s predecessor, Dave Limp, last September, has been beset by both internal structural and technological hurdles. Multiple news reports have suggested that Amazon would finally unveil it this fall.
But rather than a big AI reveal, Panos stood in front of a room full of journalists on Tuesday to unveil a slate of new devices from a product line where Amazon can feel comfortable: Kindle. He revealed four Kindles in total—ranging in price from $109.99 for the latest original Kindle, now available in Matcha, up to $399.99 for the latest Kindle Scribe. He also showed off the first color e-reader in the family, dubbed Kindle Colorsoft, which is available for preorder and will run $279.99.
While the humble Kindle e-reader might not seem as sexy to technologists as a forthcoming AI-boosted Alexa, Panos at times seemed personally smitten with his team’s new creations, using the descriptor “romantic” frequently throughout his roughly 40-minute talk.
Of the original Kindle’s size, he remarked: “Maybe the most romantic thing about this … product is you can put it in your pocket.”
The video introducing the Colorsoft was also “romantic.” As was the “quite romantic” setting of the press event—a salon-style space on the eighth floor of New York City’s the Shed art center, drenched in natural light thanks to a high glass ceiling.
Whether or not some of Panay’s emotion was more performance-driven than organic, it was refreshing both because it was not typically Amazonian—and maybe that’s the point for a division that could use reinvigorating—and because it occurred at a press event in which the current industry infatuation with gen AI was largely absent.
In fact, the only AI references arose when Panay discussed the new Kindle Scribe, which sports artificial intelligence that works in the background to summarize a user’s notes, and to make one’s writing more legible or neater if they so choose. Panay later told Fortune that he and his teams whittled down a list of more than 50 AI-powered feature ideas to this final pair.
“The point of gen AI is not to have gen AI,” he said in a short interview after his presentation. “The point is to make it useful.”
And that is the dilemma Panay and the teams working on a new AI-powered Alexa have been facing since at least last year: How do you re-architect and reimagine the company’s decade-old voice assistant using gen AI in a way that is truly differentiated and useful?
While tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity AI have captured the minds of technologists and everyday consumers worldwide, Alexa has, at least publicly, been standing still. What those other tools provide in usefulness, though, they can lack in emotional connection. Whether large swaths of humanity desire that from artificial beings remains to be seen, but there’s an opening there for Amazon, Alexa, and Panay.
I was curious what Panay thought of that idea. He had just spent considerable time expressing to reporters the emotional impact of Kindle features like faster page-flips or the right vibration of a digital pen against a Kindle’s screen.
Should we expect the new Alexa to elicit such a personal response in him and others, too, especially when recent versions of the voice assistant have at times strayed toward desperate nudging?
“I mean, you’re definitely going to hear me talk about emotion,” Panay told Fortune exclusively about the forthcoming Alexa release. “And connection. People have an interesting relationship with Alexa. There’s hundreds of millions of people that do right now. So you have to get it right.”
“The products coming,” he added, “are pretty awesome.”
Are you a current or former Amazon employee with thoughts on this topic or a tip to share? Contact Jason Del Rey at jason.delrey@fortune.com, jasondelrey@protonmail.com, or through secure messaging app Signal at 917-655-4267. You can also message him on LinkedIn or at @delrey on X.
