Is Amazon’s Echo Dominance an AI Express Lane?

With AI leading the markets forward, we want to consider how Amazon will participate and how likely they are to assume a leadership position.

The big stories in AI today are in chips, and browser, phone, and computer-based manifestations. Amazon does not compete with Nvidia, nor do they have a major browser (apologies to Silk users) or PC or smartphone platform. Amazon does, though, have a very strong position in the smart speaker market with its Echo device lineup. We think that may be a relatively open path to AI relevance.

Amazon has a huge share of the US smart speaker market. That share has ticked up by a percentage point in each of the last few years, to the point where Echo has just short of three-quarters of the market (Chart 1). Please note this analysis is based on data on our twice-a-year survey of US smart speaker buyers.