Amazon devices chief Panos Panay on the importance of failure and bouncing back from it
1:38 PM PDT · October 15, 2026
Amazon executive Panos Panay has a message for startup founders: Failure is an inevitable, required part of building a successful product.
Panay, Amazon SVP of Devices, Alexa, and Leo, shared that advice onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, drawing on his own experience at Microsoft, where he spent more than 19 years and weathered one particularly expensive failure.
“You have to be willing to fail, and actually, not just willing, you actually have to go fail,” Panay said. “If you haven’t failed, you probably haven’t pushed the boundary. It’s literally about harvesting the lessons learned when you fail. You have to be willing to face it, and as you face it, learn from it.”
Panay said it’s possible to recover from all sorts of failures, even catastrophic ones, noting that he experienced one himself at Microsoft. He described the launch of the Surface RT, Microsoft’s first tablet computer, as a significant failure during his tenure at the company, one that ultimately led to a nearly $1 billion write-down.
“I remember being on the front cover of a newspaper, and it just said failure,” Panay said. “But, here’s the thing, it was easy to admit failure. The trick was, and always is, did you harvest the learnings and understand what happened? All right. What did you learn? Because the failure wasn’t that moment. It was decisions that led up to it two years before that, whether the software wasn’t complete or the inventory was wrong or how we balanced into retail. There were all these steps along the way.”
He said founders need to be willing to understand what went wrong, and avoid making excuses, and ultimately accept the failure.
“Here’s the other side of it,” he said. “You want to succeed, yeah? You take that failure, but you don’t let go of your vision. That’s it. Surface has done pretty well. You don’t let go of your vision. You don’t break it.”
Panay emphasized the importance of staying committed to a vision, learning from experience, and moving quickly. He believes that by embracing failure and learning from setbacks, founders can adapt and make progress faster, even as they encounter new obstacles.
“It goes back to the same fundamental, like, have you learned?” he said. “Were you learning along the way? Because if you were learning, then you just change your vector. Usually, it’s not 180 degrees. Usually, it’s just 30 degrees. Take your lessons learned, change a little bit, adapt your vision where it needs to be, and then go. I believe there’s people that hang on too long, but it’s because they haven’t accepted the moment of failure at all.”
Topics
Amazon, Gadgets, Hardware, panos panay, TechCrunch Disrupt
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Amazon devices chief Panos Panay sees a future where AI devices replace the need to use apps
12:55 PM PDT · October 15, 2026
Amazon is placing its bets on ambient computing, not apps, as the future of personal AI.
Alongside the launch of the company’s new AI wearables from Bee, Panos Panay, who serves as Amazon’s SVP of Devices, Alexa & Leo, took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday to talk more in depth about where he sees personal computing headed.
“A lot of times, what you’re doing right now — what we all do right now — is we have to remember what we’re asking our tool to do for us,” Panay began, explaining that this is how we engage with our modern smartphones. “It’s like point, shoot, return,” Panay continued. “I think where we’re headed is a world [that] starts with ambient devices.”
By “ambient devices,” he means those that work quietly in the background, using sensors and AI to help you figure out what needs to be done, instead of the other way around, where you’re telling the device what you need to do.
“As it works in the background, you’re able to stay more present. You’re able to get more done. You’re about to spend more time with people … you’re not afraid if you miss something. It’s incredibly powerful,” Panay said.
Amazon’s biggest entry into this space is the set of new Bee devices it introduced on Thursday, which include a band you can wear on your wrist or detach to wear as a pendant, as well as a new credit-card-sized device that attaches magnetically to the back of your smartphone.
These gadgets passively record audio and take notes about your day, finding the to-dos, reminders, and insights you may later need to refer back to. To balance the need to be useful with user privacy, Bee’s devices don’t actually store the raw audio from your conversations; they process the audio in real time and then delete it when done. Transcripts of conversations are encrypted using keys that your device creates and controls. That means no one else, including Amazon employees, can access those files unless you intentionally share them.
Panay said that privacy was a key consideration for how these new ambient devices should work.
“You have to give customers that control,” he said. “Every product is different, but for Bee specifically, as an example in the ambient space like that, you have to design with privacy in mind. And that’s what we do. That’s critical.”
The executive, who came to Amazon after 19 years at Microsoft where he oversaw the development of Surface devices, has spent a lot of his life thinking about how personal computing will evolve. With Bee — and ambient computing more generally — Panay also envisioned a future where the idea of interacting with apps becomes less important, as more tasks are handled via AI.
“Do I think we have a future where there’s a bit of a balance — a whole generation that doesn’t say ‘give me the app’ for that, but says it should just understand what I need? Yeah, I do. I think that transformation is coming. I think that is the next generation,” he said.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the smartphone itself won’t continue to be an important personal computing device (as much as Amazon would like it to be an Alexa tablet or Echo smart speaker), Panay pointed out. Rather, he believes a new crop of devices will emerge that use sensors to understand users better, and to bring intelligence to the world around you.
“I’m not a proponent that says one form factor is going to replace another. I don’t think that’s the case,” he clarified. “I think there’s an intelligence layer that connects it all … and it has to be useful.”
Topics
AI, Amazon, Apps, bee, Hardware, wearables
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