Amazon’s devices head ditched the Echo in his living room for a smart TV
Since Amazon unveiled its Alexa voice assistant in 2014, the company has worked to embed the technology in as many devices as it can, from microwaves and thermostats to ear buds and wall plugs.
Now Amazon is making TVs a bigger focus of its push to put Alexa everywhere, as it looks to cement its presence in the smart home market. At a hardware event in 2021, the company unveiled its first TV sets, which users can control by voice with Alexa. Amazon followed that launch up on Wednesday, adding three new sizes of its QLED TVs and a cheaper model to its lineup of Fire TVs.
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Dave Limp, Amazon’s hardware chief, told CNBC in an interview that smart TVs are the fastest-growing part of the company’s Fire TV business, which also includes streaming sticks and the Fire TV Cube, a streaming box with Alexa. Amazon said Wednesday it has sold more than 200 million Fire TV devices globally, up from 150 million last January.
But as Amazon puts more emphasis on the TV, the company risks the possibility that consumers will shelve their Echo smart speakers, which were introduced in 2014 and soon became a home sensation. That’s not just a hypothetical. Limp ditched his living room speaker.
“I don’t have an Echo in there anymore, I just use my TV,” Limp said. “So it does serve double duty, it’s just its primary responsibility is first and foremost to be a great television.”
Limp, as you’d expect, rejects the idea that an Alexa-powered Fire TV will cannibalize the company’s Echo devices. Entertainment is still the primary purpose of the TV, and the numerous form factors of the Echo can be used in any room in the house.
For Amazon to make a dent in the hypercompetitive smart TV market, the company needs a selling point that goes beyond TV shows, movies and offering all the streaming services available. Amazon sees an opportunity to transform the TV into what’s essentially an extra-large smart display that’s always on.
The company calls it the Fire TV Ambient Experience. Other companies are doing that, too. For example, Samsung and LG have TVs that display high-quality art or photographs when they’re not in use.
“As you’re going around your house and you have all these dark panels, typically they’re off and they’re big black holes on the wall in your house,” Limp said. “So how can we make better use of them?”
Amazon is doubling down on TVs at a time when CEO Andy Jassy has moved aggressively to cut costs, resulting in the largest layoffs in company history, a corporate hiring freeze and several canceled projects.
A portion of the layoffs, which are expected to total 27,000 employees, landed in Limp’s organization, which oversees the development of products such as Alexa, Echo smart speakers and Kindle e-readers. Just under 2,000 people in Limp’s division were let go as part of the job cuts, he previously told CNBC.
Layoffs in the Alexa division were primarily in and around health-related services and newer projects that were “even higher beta,” Limp said.
“We’re still super committed to the Fire TV and Alexa businesses, and you can see it with the products,” Limp said, referring to Wednesday’s announcement.
Since its launch in 2014, Amazon has made big investments in Alexa and assigned top talent to grow the technology, largely at the direction of founder Jeff Bezos, who saw voice as key to how people would interact with computers in the future. Amazon has about 10,000 people working on Alexa-related projects.
But Bezos’ vision isn’t universally accepted. Bloomberg reported that Amazon executives have expressed concern about fading Alexa user engagement. Some worry that Echo speakers are headed in the direction of other once-trendy consumer devices that eventually lost their value. Rather than being used for shopping lists, ordering groceries and setting schedules, what if Echo owners limit their use to basic functions like alarm clocks, timers and weather updates?
Still, Limp said engagement with Alexa devices continues to increase.
“People do use it for an alarm clock, don’t get me wrong, but they use it for so many broad things,” Limp said. “It’s unbelievable when you look at the utility of what Alexa brings into the home. I think Fire TV just enhances that.”
WATCH: Amazon TV is next step for company to move into internet of things
Microsoft pushed back on a report Wednesday that the company lowered growth targets for artificial intelligence software sales after many of its salespeople missed those goals in the last fiscal year.
The company’s stock sank more than 2% on The Information report.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company has not lowered sales quotas or targets for its salespeople.
The sales lag occurred for Microsoft’s Foundry product, an Azure enterprise platform where companies can build and manage AI agents, according to The Information, which cited two salespeople in Azure’s cloud unit.
AI agents can carry out a series of actions for a user or organization autonomously.
Less than a fifth of salespeople in one U.S. Azure unit met the Foundry sales growth target of 50%, according to The Information.
In another unit, the quota was set to double Foundry sales, The Information reported. The quota was dropped to 50% after most salespeople didn’t meet it.
In a statement, the company said the news outlet inaccurately combined the concepts of growth and quotas.
“Aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered, as we informed them prior to publication,” a Microsoft Spokesperson said.
The AI boom has presented opportunities for businesses to add efficiencies and streamline tasks, with the companies that build these agents touting the power of the tools to take on work and allow workers to do more.
OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Salesforce, Amazon and others all have their own tools to create and manage these AI assistants.
But the adoption of these tools by traditional businesses hasn’t seen the same surge as other parts of the AI ecosystem.
The Information noted AI adoption struggles at private equity firm Carlyle last year, in which the tools wouldn’t reliably connect data from other places. The company later reduced how much it spent on the tools.
Read the full story from The Information here.
Waymo partners with Uber to bring robotaxi service to Atlanta and Austin.
Uber Technologies Inc.
Waymo on Wednesday said humans will begin test driving the Alphabet-owned company’s robotaxi vehicles in Baltimore, Pittsburgh and St. Louis.
The three cities represent the latest additions to Waymo’s quickly growing list of cities where the Google sister company is either operating its robotaxis, planning to launch service or starting to test its vehicles. That list now stands at 26 markets.
Waymo will begin manual drives in the trio of new cities this week with hopes to eventually begin serving fully-autonomous rides there, spokesperson Ethan Teicher told CNBC.
Over the past month, Waymo has been aggressively making announcements for new markets and developments at the Google sister company. This comes as tech rivals Amazon and Tesla made advancements in the robotaxi market in 2025. Amazon’s Zoox began offering free rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco, and Tesla this year launched ride-hailing service with human supervisors in the Austin and San Francisco markets.
In November, Waymo announced that it will soon begin manually driving in Minneapolis, Tampa and New Orleans. The company also added Houston, San Antonio and Orlando to its list of cities where it’ll launch service in 2026. Waymo also began offering rides on freeways in the San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix markets, and it named a new finance chief.
With more than 250,000 weekly paid trips, Waymo’s robotaxi service currently operates in Austin, the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, Atlanta and Los Angeles markets. The company in May said it had provided more than 10 million paid rides since launching in 2020.
The new cities further signal that Waymo is increasingly confident its service can work well in locations with colder weather conditions.
Technology
Security startup Verkada hits $5.8 billion valuation in latest funding round led by CapitalG
Filip Kaliszan, CEO of Verkada.
Courtesy: Verkada
Security technology startup Verkada has reached a $5.8 billion valuation after a new funding round led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s venture capital arm, announced Wednesday.
“I think Google saw the opportunity with us in the application of AI and everything we’re driving to apply AI to the physical security industry,” CEO Filip Kaliszan told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa.
The company said in a release that the investment will be used to bolster its artificial intelligence capabilities and provide liquidity.
The financing totaled $100 million, a person familiar with the terms of the round told CNBC, raising the company’s valuation by $1.3 billion from its Series E funding in February. The person asked not to be named in order to discuss details of the funding.
CapitalG also recently contributed to a $435 million fundraise for cybersecurity startup Armis in November.
The new funding comes as Verkada surpasses $1 billion in annualized bookings across 30,000 customers globally.
The company develops physical security products, including cameras, alarms and sensors, that are connected under a single cloud-based software platform.
Kaliszan said his company serves a broad span of businesses, such as retailers, government properties, schools, and transportation.
For example, TeraWatt Infrastructure, which supplies charging sites to electric vehicles like Google’s Waymo, uses Verkada technology to protect EV facilities.
In September, the company rolled out over 60 new AI features and platform updates, including tools like “AI-Powered Unified Timeline.”
The tool can automatically synthesize videos and images from several cameras into a single visual timeline, rather than requiring security teams to dig through multiple videos during an investigation.
“The genius of Filip and the team of Verkada is that they’re leveraging AI as a Rosetta Stone to really help unlock insights from cameras to help companies become safer and more efficient,” CapitalG general partner Derek Zanutto told Bosa.
By capturing over 20 million images per hour, Verkada can provide notable data like foot traffic, occupancy rates, security violations and other trends, Zanutto said.
He added that the physical security is a sleeping $60 billion market that is led by legacy hardware like “cameras that just record, not cameras that think” — a gap that Verkada is hoping to fill.
However, AI-powered technology will not necessarily replace human security guards any time soon.
“I think humans will be providing security to other humans for as long as I can think,” Kaliszan said. “But AI can empower these first responders to be more aware, to have situational knowledge, to know what to do, and in some cases, actually prevent the problems from happening.”
He pointed to the Louvre heist in October, where multiple crown jewels were robbed from the museum, as an opportunity where AI-assisted devices that could actively monitor, then immediately alert security forces, would be more effective than only physical personnel.
“If you could intervene right then, if you could know in real time that that’s happening, the potential for savings and preventing damage is tremendous,” he said.
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