Three Reasons Why The Alexa Prize Is A Genius Move for Amazon

Earlier last week, Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a competition for university students aimed at advancing the science of conversational AI. I think it’s an excellent strategic move for the company for three reasons:

1. The competition targets university students. This is an excellent talent acquisition strategy for Amazon. This may also signal interest by Amazon in creating a persona for Alexa that is much younger than Apple’s Siri, effectively being the conversational AI version of Snapchat contra Facebook. In other words, the Alexa Prize would give millennials a font seat in the technical and UX team for Alexa, should they be able to generate a convincing conversational AI.
2. The 2.5 million Dollars Amazon plans to spend on this prize is probably less than the cost of recruiting an in-house R&D team to make a better conversational AI experience for Alexa.
3. In conjunction with the Alexa Fund, The Alexa prize is a case in point of the “ecosystem growth hacking” approach to corporate venture capital and innovation development that I wrote about for Mattermark a few weeks ago. Amazon is bringing its considerable assets to bear on the challenge of kickstarting engineering interest in its new platform, rather than counting on interest to develop organically. The winning team gets their software integrated into Alexa, which is obviously great for Amazon and the winning team, but Amazon also benefits from the exposure the Alexa platform gets among university-aged engineers.

For now, there is still over three weeks until the deadline for application submissions. What comes of this particular competition is not yet known, but I’m willing to bet that there are going to be more competitions like this in the future, and not just from Amazon.