What does the future hold for Amazon?

The full story can be found at Business Leader.

The future for this giant is equally complex but more importantly, it is not solely to be found online. Amazon has already started buying traditional retail chains and is opening its own ‘bricks and mortar’ stores but at its heart, it will continue to succeed because it is a data-driven business.

The Alexa voice assistant remains the next big opportunity for Amazon. By bringing voice interfaces into the mainstream (and the living room and kitchen), the ability for Amazon to be the voice and service at the other end of the line only increases its opportunities to monetise engagement with customers within its ecosystem.

Patents have been filed recently specifically describing extensions to the capabilities of Alexa that take engagement into new data-driven customer services. All this means that Amazon is continuously learning from the data it gathers to deliver services consumers want, that are combined together in ways that can generate more revenue for the company.

The advantage in building an encompassing consumer ecosystem is that regular customers are increasingly likely to purchase immediately without making any comparisons. With customers not looking at other online prices or considering their local and high street prices, Amazon already has a tactical advantage over its many competitors in the retail sector – as well as any sector in which it chooses to experiment.

Any sector that is ready for data-driven transformation is a potential target for being brought into the Amazon ecosystem. There are already many hints through its recent acquisitions as to what Amazon is considering as their next big thing.

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

Amazon’s 2019 purchase of the autonomous vehicle company Aurora is too sensible to ignore. The Christmas 2018 launch of the AWS DeepRacer 1/18th model car joins the dots very clearly.

The AWS badge links the vehicle with Amazon’s cloud computing service and much of the publicity about the kit presents it as an emerging esport offering with a DeepRacer League and a DeepRacer Cup.

Entering the $1bn (£780m) global esports economy with a new competitive platform certainly justifies an occasional experiment. It is also worth remembering that Amazon paid nearly $1bn (£780m)  five years ago to buy Twitch – the video game streaming service and more recently the augmented and virtual reality company Goo Technologies along with the network of gaming websites called Curse.

But even more attractive is the potential for Amazon to use data from DeepRacer to build a route into the multi-trillion-dollar logistics industry by developing its own autonomous trucks and cars.

The use of autonomous electric vehicles would be a significant development for the core of Amazon’s retail business. It is also unlikely that the design of the infrastructure that will deliver Amazon products to homes in the future could be comfortably left to others including potential competitors.

WILL AMAZON LAUNCH ITS OWN CAR?

The investment Amazon has made into other artificial intelligence and machine learning companies including Harvest.ai and Graphiq is further evidence of an intended push into the autonomous vehicle market. It is only with robust, highly responsive AI technologies that safe vehicles can be produced that will satisfy local regulators, insurers and the Amazon customer.

Making Amazon’s own brand of autonomous cars available to consumers would be a new direction for its retail activity.

HOW REALISTIC IS THE LAUNCH OF THE BANK OF AMAZON?

Much has also been said about Amazon’s potential move into the banking and financial service sector.

This is because it leads to the potential for Amazon to explore creative ways to offer different payment options for its consumers, that keep them within the ecosystem and at the same time can challenge traditional banking practices – without itself becoming the Bank of Amazon.

Amazon’s investment so far in financial services has been with the disruptive fintech sector in specific countries. This makes sense because the financial services industry is highly regulated and very different in every country where Amazon currently operates. Coupled with the continuing dominance of traditional banks in most countries, it is prudent for Amazon itself to wait.

At the same time it can continue to support disruption and provide the ecosystem – including AWS – on which others can build their own fintech innovations. Amazon already sits on enough computing power and technical capability to develop and launch its own cryptocurrency that could rival bitcoin or Ethereum.

There are many reasons why cryptocurrency is important to Amazon. While the focus of media attention has been on the exchange price and volatility of a single bitcoin the real value of these currencies is their divisibility. A coin can be divided into any small fraction that is required. An ability that would make micropayments for very small (digital) services commercially practical.

But taking this potentially radical course of action is only viable once there is mainstream acceptance of cryptocurrency by the core consumers in the ecosystem and there is sufficient regulation in place – not so much to protect consumers but rather to protect Amazon.

A far more attractive proposition for Amazon would be to monetise the blockchain itself by giving it an easy-to-use interface within the ecosystem that would then enable its users to create their own entries in the public ledger.

With enough soft Amazon wrapping around the technical complexities of this system, a challenge to the legal services industry would bring an entirely new level of high value and high margin services to the company.

HOW COULD IT IMPACT THE HEALTH SECTOR?

Machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities also open new opportunities in the health sector. A recently filed patent for Alexa detects when someone is ill through slight changes in their voice or audible coughing. It is unlikely that a patent of this type is a coincidence when Amazon also purchased Pillpack, a US-based online prescription service, in 2018.

Amazon appears unstoppable. As it has expanded from the relatively unregulated world of selling books there are a variety of barriers that it must overcome to expand its existing ecosystem. Both autonomous vehicles and healthcare move the company into highly regulated areas in the same way as any development into the financial services sector. The situations vary within each country that Amazon operates.

WHAT ARE THE THREATS TO AMAZON?

The government regulations around finance, cars, and health are all in place to primarily protect people. But different countries hold different views about the ways in which protection should be experienced.

For example, the centralised and public model of UK healthcare including the NHS’s tight data security may prove too big a challenge for Amazon’s 3.8% operating margin to tackle head on. However, the rise of citizen health with its encouragement of informed sharing between individuals provides a different route to monetising any Amazon health device or service.

THREAT OF DIGITAL SERVICES TAX

Even more challenging for all of Amazon’s operations in the UK is the 2% digital services tax (DST) on revenue that was introduced by the Chancellor in 2018. It will be of the most marginal relief to Amazon that this tax is only applied after the first £250m of revenue.

This is unashamedly a taxing of the largest US-based Internet companies. While Facebook and Google – where operating margins are significantly higher – may not pause to reconsider their UK business models, it is closer to the bone for a retailer which saw $14.5bn (£11.4bn) worth of sales (in 2018) from its third-largest market.

The tax may be enough incentive for Amazon to move towards a bricks and mortar model in the UK, to focus on higher margin services or, more simply, to raise prices.

The tax will not see Amazon shuttered. For a company that is not afraid to experiment to extend its ecosystem and its markets, this will just be the next challenge to innovate further.