Alexa could be the 4th pillar of Amazon, says Jeff Bezos

Amazon has three big pillars: the retail marketplace, Amazon Prime, and Amazon Web Services. But there certainly would be room for a fourth pillar.

It’s possible that Amazon Studios, which is producing original video content for Prime Video, could be that fourth pillar, but it’s also possible that the Alexa voice assistant, which is packaged inside of the Echo speaker, could end up being the fourth pillar, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos told Recode’s Walt Mossberg today at Recode’s Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Google revealed its own Echo competitor earlier this month, and Apple is also working on an answer to the Echo. But Bezos does not seem to be worried about that.

“I think there are going to be a bunch of artificially intelligent agents in the world,” Bezos said. “There are going to be specialties, and you may not ask the same AI for everything. I bet the average household will use a number of these, but to me that’s a very exciting seed that we’ve planted. I love working on stuff like that, and the team is brilliant.”

Amazon now has more than 1,000 people working on artificial intelligence, Bezos said.

Earlier today, Amazon stock hit an all-time high of $724.23 on the NASDAQ.