Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced on Tuesday that he will step down as CEO later this year and become executive chairman of the company's board. He described the move in a letter to employees as an opportunity for him to focus on "new products and early initiatives" and his various pet projects like his space-flight company Blue Origin and the Washington Post. In Bezo's stead, longtime Amazon executive Andy Jassy will become the new CEO. So, who exactly is that guy? Jassy joined Amazon in 1997, three years after its founding.

But in a rare interview during a health conference, one of its senior leaders hinted at some areas of focus for the e-commerce giant. Taha Kass-Hout, the former U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief health informatics officer who joined Amazon in March, didn't reveal any trade secrets in the interview with the health website Stat, but indicated that Amazon sees big potential in developing AI tools for health. "AI is medicine is not a new concept," Kass-Hout said, explaining that the earliest uses of the technology in health dates to the 1960s when it was first used to navigate patients to the right place. He noted that the past year has seen a massive uptick in research papers that use "prediction and natural language understanding" in a variety of new ways. Despite that, he also cautioned that AI tools have been overhyped.

NEW YORK-- Alexa and Siri, rival voice assistants on Amazon's Echo and Apple's iPhone, don't directly communicate with one another. But the Amazon executive in charge of Alexa and the Amazon Echo said he'd welcome the idea. "You should be able to tell Alexa, ask Siri X,'" said David Limp, senior vice president of devices at Amazon. "If Apple or Google want to come calling, my phone number is out there, they can call...I don't know if I can envision it but I hope that will happen on behalf of customers," Limp told a group of journalists at the Wired Business Conference Wednesday in New York. Limp has a strong interest in Apple's entry into the voice-activated, artificially-intelligent infused speaker space, which also includes Google Home and Microsoft's Cortana on the Harmon Kardon Invoke speaker.