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Remember Big Bang Theory’s Rajesh Koothrappali being besotted by Siri many many seasons back. Well chances are that Rajesh may soon start a passionate affair with a new muse – Alexa.

And why not?

Amazon Alexa for the likes of Rajesh and others has become quite a seductive proposition in the last one year largely due to its simplicity in adding features and more importantly its ability to take action based on voice. Alexa is largely being used for home automation, news, music streaming, food and business, shopping, etc. What makes Alexa even more alluring is its potential of adding value to businesses by providing relevant information which will help business leaders understand more about their deliverables / status without having to ask their teams or browsing multiple internal sites. Alexa is built for the UX of the future. One can easily add custom capabilities to Alexa by using the Alexa skills kit.

Here are some features/commands/skills which if added to Alexa could change the smart assistant paradigm forever:

* What dreams are made of – Alexa for Project Management / Status updates

Most companies that have moved to Agile have invested a lot in getting things automated to speed up delivery. With Agile comes a lot of open source and paid tools for project tracking, issue tracking, estimating, etc. However, multiple scrum teams following varied models of story pointing and estimation make it difficult for the leaders to understand the current project status. There are teams who create individual dashboards and this data then is further consolidated in a single dashboard for leadership and management consumption.

Here Alexa presents an unique opportunity that can be leveraged to quickly find answers to day-to-day questions that business leaders have. Imagine Alexa providing answers to below questions?
 How many user stories picked up in the current iteration/sprint?
 What is the total number of story points?
 How many resources are currently working on Project X?
 Based on the current velocity when can we release?

This information might be available on the dashboard, but Alexa providing answers to these without having business leaders to access different dashboard is absolutely unique.

* A true SMART assistant in all instances

In the fast paced environments of today, with multiple teams focussing on different priorities based on project requirements, it becomes difficult to keep a tab on the spending. Most of the companies would have budgeting exercise done for the entire year and then distribute it based on the priorities across all quarters. This includes CapEX as well as OpEx. It can be very useful if business leaders can get immediate answers to questions regarding the budgets. Alexa would enjoy an elevated status among SMART assistants if it were to provide
quick answers to these questions
 What is the budget for X quarter?
 How much is the total spend on OpEX for the quarter?
 How much is the total CapEX spend?
 What CapEX is available for this quarter? And so on.

Without having the need to access internal sites, seeking information from individual managers or accessing some common excel sheet to fetch this information, Alexa could surely become the darling of business leaders.

* Even Talk Cloud

With increased cloud adoption many companies and startups provide insights into the cloud usage and billing. They do provide a lot of information about the resource utilization and billing patterns, however business leaders would want answers to simple questions before even getting into understanding the why and how.

Alexa can be leveraged here in getting answers to simple questions like what is the current AWS bill, based on the current usage pattern what will be the bill for this month, stop machines not being used for the last 10 days, how many volumes are unused in the environment, how many ec2 instances having a particular tag, etc. These simple skills if implemented can add a lot of value in quickly knowing about the infrastructure without looking at multiple screens to decipher this.

With increasing number of developers on this platform it is just a matter of time when all the above imagined features and many such more will become a reality. Also with the Alexa and Cortana integration recently announced most of this can be leveraged across multiple environments.

So isn’t Rajesh right then to woo Alexa?