Amazon fell behind in AI. An Alexa creator is leading its push to catch up.

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. As one of the chief architects of Amazon’s Alexa, Rohit Prasad has been at the vanguard of artificial intelligence. Now, he is leading the company’s effort to catch up in the AI race.

The Seattle company was taken aback by a surge in competitors’ AI capabilities. It turned to Prasad to upgrade the technology for its Alexa voice assistant and reboot the company’s AI ambitions. Alexa—which is integrated into more than 500 million devices around the world—has been one of the dominant AI assistants, along with Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant.

OpenAI released ChatGPT, and the AI race’s rules changed. Amazon put thousands of people in a new team under Prasad to develop AI products for an Alexa upgrade and other businesses. The company has been building its own large language models—the software behind generative AI—and it is taking time to train and fine-tune the powerful technology.

While it is expected to unveil a new Alexa with AI as early as next month, Amazon insiders say the company has struggled to catch up with OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google and others that fixated on the new AI earlier. Amazon’s proprietary AI models are still behind those of its biggest competitors, say insiders and industry analysts. If Amazon cannot regain its edge in AI, it risks losing its position as a front-runner in tech innovation.

“At this point, they’re not leaders," said Gil Luria, an analyst with investment bank D.A. Davidson. Amazon has said it isn’t behind and that it is playing the long game with AI.