Amazon is building an AI phone codenamed 'Transformer'

More than ten years after the Fire Phone failure, Amazon is reportedly developing a new smartphone built around the Alexa AI assistant. The phone is codenamed "Transformer" and is being developed in Amazon's ZeroOne group under J Allard, previously known for his work on Xbox and Zune at Microsoft.

According to Reuters, the team is exploring both smartphone and "dumbphone" designs, drawing inspiration from the minimalist Light Phone. App availability was one of the main challenges with the original Fire Phone, and Amazon is now looking at approaches that could avoid this problem entirely — possibly through mini apps similar to those in ChatGPT, rather than a full app store.

Alexa won't necessarily be the primary operating system, but AI integration is central to the project. No launch timeline has been set.

For CIOs evaluating AI tools for their employees, this signals that major platform players see hardware as the next arena for AI competition. An Alexa-powered enterprise phone could potentially reshape how mobile work tools function.