This year, Amazon Alexa launched the Alexa Cup: a worldwide competition inviting organizations “to strategize, prepare, build, and pitch an Alexa skill & go-to-market plan that solves a business problem or pain point for a brand/client.” Globant was fortunate enough to participate and be represented by a great team, who qualified for the US National round last month.
Through our close ties with Alexa’s ecosystem of partnerships, we caught wind of the competition. Amazon’s Alexa partner network extended an invitation to Globant along with dozens of other organizations. Participants had to submit a pitch for a client, with a writeup and quick presentation. It had to help solve a client problem and push the Alexa ecosystem forward. Vardah Malik (Voice UX Designer), Kris Bruland (Solution Architect), and I represented Globant. Our idea: to extend the current fitness brand of one of our clients to create the first true voice enabled, humanized personal training experience by taking advantage of all the unique information they already receive from their customers on nutrition, workout plans, and personal goals. We submitted the proposal, and were one of 4 teams selected to compete for the title of US West Coast Champion.
Kicking off the Alexa Cup competition
May 21st was an intensive morning in San Francisco, working on our presentation and pitch, and developing the POC of our selected Alexa experience. We then presented it to the audience and a panel of judges as though they were the client. We focused on the potential of voice technology to take advantage of the client’s existing data on their customer to provide a better, more personalized and human centric trainer than online workout videos.
All of the contestants had amazing concepts and strong presentations, several of which focused on healthcare applications. Judges gave feedback to each group after the presentations were over, and chose a winner. Globant came out on top for the West Coast round, a huge honor. Meanwhile the country and region qualifier rounds were also taking place in Toronto, Chicago, NY, and Mexico City.
Takeaways
This week we had the opportunity to compete for the Alexa Cup USA championship. The winner there would then move on to the Americas championship. We came in well prepared with a polished presentation, concept, and strategy, but came up short of winning the USA Championship. Although we won’t be moving on, we are proud to have made it to this round of the competition. We’ll continue to use our experience and leadership in voice to work closely with our customers to bring new voice experiences to life. It was an exciting quest! We are grateful for the increased connectedness of our team, as well as the ever growing capability to bring new experiences to our clients. Winning would only have been the icing on the cake.
