This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Jeff Bezos is back in startup mode (sort of) with Project Prometheus — a $6.2 billion AI-for-the-physical-world venture that instantly became one of the most talked-about new companies in tech. We dig into what this really means, why the company’s location is still a mystery, and how this echoes the era when Bezos was regularly launching big bets from Seattle.
Then we look at Amazon’s latest real-world experiment: package-return kiosks popping up inside Goodwill stores around the Seattle region. It’s a small pilot, but it brings back memories of the early days when Amazon’s oddball experiments seemed to appear out of nowhere.
And finally…Todd tries to justify his scheme to upgrade his beloved 2007 Toyota Camry with CarPlay, Android Auto, and a backup camera — while John questions the logic of sinking thousands of dollars into an old car.
All that, plus a mystery Microsoft shirt, a little Seattle nostalgia, and a look ahead to next week’s podcast collaboration with Me, Myself and AI from MIT Sloan Management Review.
With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop.
Kiro’s ghost mascot assists an action-figure developer on a miniature set during a stop-motion video shoot in Seattle, part of an unconventional social marketing campaign for Amazon’s AI-powered software development tool. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Can the software development hero conquer the “AI Slop Monster” to uncover the gleaming, fully functional robot buried beneath the coding chaos?
That was the storyline unfolding inside a darkened studio at Seattle Center last week, as Amazon’s Kiro software development system was brought to life for a promotional video.
Instead of product diagrams or keynote slides, a crew from Seattle’s Packrat creative studio used action figures on a miniature set to create a stop-motion sequence. In this tiny dramatic scene, Kiro’s ghost mascot played the role that the product aims to fill in real life — a stabilizing force that brings structure and clarity to AI-assisted software development.
No, this is not your typical Amazon Web Services product launch.
Kiro (pronounced KEE-ro) is Amazon’s effort to rethink how developers use AI. It’s an integrated development environment that attempts to tame the wild world of vibe coding, the increasingly popular technique that creates working apps and websites from natural language prompts.
But rather than simply generating code from prompts, Kiro breaks down requests into formal specifications, design documents, and task lists. This spec-driven development approach aims to solve a fundamental problem with vibe coding: AI can quickly generate prototypes, but without structure or documentation, that code becomes unmaintainable.
A close-up of Kiro’s ghost mascot, with the AI Slop Monster and robot characters in the background. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
It’s part of Amazon’s push into AI-powered software development, expanding beyond its AWS Code Whisperer tool to compete more aggressively against rivals such as Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini Code Assist, and open-source AI coding assistants.
The market for AI-powered development tools is booming. Gartner expects AI code assistants to become ubiquitous, forecasting that 90% of enterprise software engineers will use them by 2028, up from less than 14% in early 2024. A July 2025 report from Market.us projects the AI code assistant market will grow from $5.5 billion in 2024 to $47.3 billion by 2034.
Amazon launched Kiro in preview in July, to a strong response. Positive early reviews were tempered by frustration from users unable to gain access. Capacity constraints have since been resolved, and Amazon says more than 250,000 developers used Kiro in the first three months.
The internet is “full of prototypes that were built with AI,” said Deepak Singh, Amazon’s vice president of developer agents and experiences, in an interview last week. The problem, he explained, is that if a developer returns to that code two months later, or hands it to a teammate, “they have absolutely no idea what prompts led to that. It’s gone.”
Kiro solves that problem by offering two distinct modes of working. In addition to “vibe mode,” where they can quickly prototype an idea, Kiro has a more structured “spec mode,” with formal specifications, design documents, and task lists that capture what the software is meant to do.
Now, the company is taking Kiro out of preview into general availability, rolling out new features and opening the tool more broadly to development teams and companies.
‘Very different and intentional approach’
As a product of Amazon’s cloud division, Kiro is unusual in that it’s relevant well beyond the world of AWS. It works across languages, frameworks, and deployment environments. Developers can build in JavaScript, Python, Go, or other languages and run applications anywhere — on AWS, other cloud platforms, on-premises, or locally.
That flexibility and broader reach are key reasons Amazon gave Kiro a standalone brand rather than presenting it under the AWS or Amazon umbrella.
AWS Chief Marketing Officer Julia White (right) on set with Zeek Earl, executive creative director at Packrat, during the stop-motion video shoot for Amazon’s Kiro development tool. (Amazon Photo)
It was a “very different and intentional approach,” said Julia White, AWS chief marketing officer, in an interview at the video shoot. The idea was to defy the assumptions that come with the AWS name, including the idea that Amazon’s tools are built primarily for its own cloud.
White, a former Microsoft and SAP executive who joined AWS as chief marketing officer a year ago, has been working on the division’s fundamental brand strategy and calls Kiro a “wonderful test bed for how far we can push it.” She said those lessons are starting to surface elsewhere across AWS as the organization looks to “get back to that core of our soul.”
With developers, White said, “you have to be incredibly authentic, you need to be interesting. You need to have a point of view, and you can never be boring.” That philosophy led to the fun, quirky, and irreverent approach behind Kiro’s ghost mascot and independent branding.
The marketing strategy for Kiro caused some internal hesitation, White recalled. People inside the company wondered whether they could really push things that far.
Her answer was emphatic: “Yep, yep, we can. Let’s do it.”
Amazon’s Kiro has caused a minor stir in Seattle media circles, where the KIRO radio and TV stations, pronounced like Cairo, have used the same four letters stretching back into the last century. People at the stations were not exactly thrilled by Amazon’s naming choice.
Early user adoption
With its core audience of developers, however, the product has struck a nerve in a positive way. During the preview period, Kiro handled more than 300 million requests and processed trillions of tokens as developers explored its capabilities, according to stats provided by the company.
Amit Patel (left), director of software engineering for Kiro, and Deepak Singh (right), Amazon’s vice president of developer agents and experiences, at AWS offices in Seattle last week. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Rackspace used Kiro to complete what they estimated as 52 weeks of software modernization in three weeks, according to Amazon executives. SmugMug and Flickr are among other companies espousing the virtues of Kiro’s spec-driven development approach. Early users are posting in glowing terms about the efficiencies they’re seeing from adopting the tool.
Kiro uses a tiered pricing model based on monthly credits: a free plan with 50 credits, a Pro plan at $20 per user per month with 1,000 credits, a Pro+ plan at $40 with 2,000 credits, and a Power tier at $200 with 10,000 credits, each with pay-per-use overages.
With the move to general availability, Amazon says teams can now manage Kiro centrally through AWS IAM Identity Center, and startups in most countries can apply for up to 100 free Pro+ seats for a year’s worth of Kiro credits.
New features include property-based testing — a way to verify that generated code actually does what developers specified — and a new command-line interface in the terminal, the text-based workspace many programmers use to run and test their code.
A new checkpointing system lets developers roll back changes or retrace an agent’s steps when an idea goes sideways, serving as a practical safeguard for AI-assisted coding.
Amit Patel, director of software engineering for Kiro, said the team itself is deliberately small — a classic Amazon “two-pizza team.”
And yes, they’ve been using Kiro to build Kiro, which has allowed them to move much faster. Patel pointed to a complex cross-platform notification feature that had been estimated to take four weeks of research and development. Using Kiro, one engineer prototyped it the next day and shipped the production-ready version in a day and a half.
Patel said this reflects the larger acceleration of software development in recent years. “The amount of change,” he said, “has been more than I’ve experienced in the last three decades.”
Cisco plans to acquire NeuralFabric, a Seattle-area startup founded by a group of Microsoft veterans that makes back-end software for companies to build and run their own generative AI models. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The Silicon Valley enterprise tech mainstay said the deal will bolster its AI Canvas initiative, a generative UI and collaboration environment announced earlier this year.
In its announcement Thursday morning, Cisco highlighted NeuralFabric’s expertise in distributed systems, model training, and flexible deployment as a complement to its existing AI assistant, cybersecurity models, and data fabric strategy.
DJ Sampath, senior vice president for AI software and platforms, said in the announcement that the startup has “cracked a crucial part of this puzzle” by building technology that lets companies develop their own domain-specific small language models using proprietary data across cloud or on-premises environments.
NeuralFabric, based in Redmond, was founded in 2023 by former Microsoft Azure engineering veteran Weijie Lin (CEO), longtime Microsoft executive John deVadoss, AI entrepreneur Jesus Rodriguez (president), and cloud and security veteran Mark Baciak (CTO), with former Microsoft director Drew Gude (chief revenue officer) also listed as an early exec.
The startup employs about nine people, according to LinkedIn. Cisco said the acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of its 2026 fiscal year (by the end of January), after which NeuralFabric’s team will join the company’s AI Software and Platform organization.
NeuralFabric had raised at least $5 million in funding as of February 2024 announcement. PitchBook lists investors including Collab+Currency, CMT Digital, and New Form Capital.
Luxembourg Prime Minister Luc Frieden in Redmond, Wash., during his visit to the Seattle region this week. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
What can Seattle learn about Amazon from Luxembourg?
At first glance, there aren’t many similarities between the Pacific Northwest tech hub and the small European nation, a financial powerhouse tucked between France and Germany. But we share a few things in common: a strong space sector, a taste for global innovation — and the outsized presence of Amazon in our local economies.
That last one made Luxembourg Prime Minister Luc Frieden’s visit to Seattle this week especially intriguing. Luxembourg is Amazon’s European headquarters, home to more than 4,250 employees, making the company the country’s second-largest private employer, and the fourth-largest overall.
Amazon’s workforce in Luxembourg spans Operations, Stores, Devices, and Amazon Web Services, including many of its European and international leaders. Illustrating its deep economic footprint in the country of 660,000 people, the tech giant says it invested more than €1.8 billion in Luxembourg in 2024 alone.
As part of a broader interview with GeekWire during his current West Coast tech tour, the prime minister explained how the country manages the relationship with the tech giant — describing Amazon as “a very good corporate citizen,” and explaining that he views the company as a “strategic partner.”
His comments stand in contrast to Amazon’s history in Seattle, where elected leaders have often wrestled with the impact of the company’s growth, and where the tech giant has at times threatened to slow hiring or relocate operations in response to proposed regulations.
“We consider Amazon almost to be a Luxembourg company,” Frieden said. “They use all the opportunities that we give to them, and that is my advice for other countries, as well. We are business friendly, we are open, we are stable, [and] we are predictable.”
That business-friendly approach isn’t new for Frieden. The 61-year-old prime minister, who was Luxembourg’s finance and justice minister before spending a decade in private legal practice, returned to lead the country in 2023 on a platform of maintaining Luxembourg’s competitiveness while strengthening its sovereignty.
Luxembourg Prime Minister Luc Frieden and his wife, Marjolijne Frieden (front row, left), attend a Te Deum Mass marking the accession of Grand Duke Guillaume V at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Luxembourg on Oct. 5, 2025. The ceremony followed the abdication of Grand Duke Henri after 25 years on the throne. (Photo: SIP / Claude Piscitelli, Gouvernement.lu)
Luxembourg is a parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy, and a founding member of the European Union. It’s known for a business-friendly tax environment that has attracted many international companies — making it one of the wealthiest and most connected nations in Europe.
Frieden’s trip was framed in Luxembourg media as a high-stakes working visit to “court leading AI firms” in Seattle and the Bay Area. As reported by RTL Today, the official purpose was to “strengthen economic, technological, and scientific partnerships” with a particular focus on artificial intelligence.
As part of his Pacific Northwest tour, Frieden visited companies including Microsoft, Boeing, and Amazon and met with a variety of Seattle tech, business, and venture capital leaders. His visit came as businesses in the Seattle area and Washington state grapple with a slate of new state and local taxes, raising long-term questions about the region’s economic competitiveness.
GeekWire spoke with Frieden at a corner table inside Redmond’s Woodblock restaurant, where his motorcade prompted some passersby to ask if U.S. immigration forces had descended. Nope, just the prime minister of one of the world’s friendliest nations.
Too much reliance on U.S. tech?
But we’re not the only ones curious about the Amazon relationship. Frieden was also questioned about it during an Oct. 7 appearance before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.
Alex Agius Saliba, a Member of the European Parliament from Malta, asked in his public comments how Frieden could reconcile Luxembourg’s goals for digital sovereignty — ensuring critical data and digital services remain under national or European control — with the fact that Amazon, a U.S. corporation, is such a big employer and a key part of its tech and economic infrastructure.
The prime minister didn’t get a chance to address the question during his European Parliament appearance, so we put it to him in our interview. He rejected the idea of a conflict.
“No,” Frieden said, “because I think digital sovereignty does not mean that you cut yourself off from the rest of the world. It’s only about having some control over your data, and that is a legitimate goal, I think, for any government, for any region.”
Frieden, whose U.S. trip also includes a visit to Silicon Valley, cited Luxembourg’s partnership with Google as an example of how digital sovereignty can be maintained in collaboration with U.S. tech giants.
That initiative, called Clarence, is a joint venture between Luxembourg’s LuxConnect and Belgium’s Proximus that provides a sovereign cloud solution for sensitive workloads while using Google Cloud technology. Luxembourg’s financial regulator recently adopted the platform to develop AI applications with full data sovereignty, and Google has also partnered with the University of Luxembourg on research initiatives.
AI regulation
Beyond cloud infrastructure, Frieden addressed one of the most pressing tech policy challenges facing both Europe and the United States: artificial intelligence regulation.
On that front, he expressed concern about the U.S. government’s fragmented approach. Europe has its AI Act, while the U.S. has an emerging patchwork of federal initiatives and state laws.
“It’s the wrong approach, because AI is by nature global,” Frieden said, arguing that Europe and the U.S. need to get on the same page. “That is why I believe that we have to work with the U.S. as Europeans to make sure that the rules are more or less aligned.”
While he considers the EU’s AI Act a more comprehensive attempt to regulate AI, Frieden is among the European leaders pushing for simplification. “Like in many areas of European regulation, it is a little bit too complicated,” he said. “That’s why I am among those heads of state and government who have asked the Commission to simplify the rules.”
The AI boom
With tech companies pouring billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, we asked if Frieden is concerned about the risk of a global AI bubble and its potential economic or environmental consequences.
Frieden said he focuses on the positive aspects and welcomes the investments. While acknowledging that AI’s environmental impact needs to be managed, he drew a comparison to aviation — another industry he engaged with during his visit to Boeing.
Just as the aviation industry works to reduce emissions rather than halting flights, he argued, AI’s side effects can be addressed while allowing the technology to flourish.
He compared the current AI revolution to past breakthroughs.
“Every few decades there’s a major evolution in mankind, and that evolution always comes due to technology,” he said, citing electricity and the internet as precedents. AI, he said, “will have a huge impact on the way we live together, we work together.”
The challenge for political leaders is choosing whether to “support the fear of the people, or whether they encourage people to embrace technological change.” Frieden places himself firmly in the latter camp: “Every technological innovation has brought positive changes to mankind.”
Space exploration
The prime minister’s visit also highlighted another Seattle-Luxembourg connection: space. Luxembourg has been a global leader in the field for decades, building on its 40-year history as a satellite hub for companies like SES and Intelsat.
The country established the SpaceResources.lu initiative for space mining and recently announced “Project Oasis,” a partnership with Kent-based Blue Origin — the commercial space venture founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — to map lunar resources.
An artist’s conception shows the Oasis-1 satellite mapping water ice deposits on the moon. (Blue Origin Illustration)
Frieden emphasized that Luxembourg’s space, science, and technology initiatives are interconnected, not competing priorities. “We developed three strategies: an AI strategy, a data strategy and a quantum strategy,” he said. “Space is part of some of those strategies as well.”
Luxembourg’s appeal
One sign that Luxembourg’s approach might be working? We’ve heard anecdotally that when U.S. tech workers — especially from Amazon — are assigned to Luxembourg from Seattle or the Bay Area, they often don’t want to return.
The prime minister attributed this to Luxembourg’s high quality of life, including its safety, its diverse population — half the country’s residents are foreign nationals — and its proximity to major European cities like Paris and Amsterdam.
“It’s a very peaceful country,” Frieden said, noting that this combination of factors makes Luxembourg particularly attractive to international tech workers.
Image created by Google Gemini based on the audio of this week’s GeekWire Podcast.
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Why is Amazon laying off 14,000 people in the middle of an AI boom — and is it really a boom at all? We dig into the contradiction at the heart of Seattle’s tech scene, discussing Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s “world’s largest startup” rationale and what it says about the company’s culture and strategy. And we debate whether AI progress represents true transformation or the familiar signs of a tech bubble in the making.
Then we examine the vision of Cascadia high-speed rail — the ambitious plan to connect Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, B.C., by bullet train. Is it the regional infrastructure needed to power the Pacific Northwest’s next chapter, or an expensive dream looking for a purpose?
With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop
Ring founder and Amazon exec Jamie Siminoff’s book, Ding Dong: How Ring Went From Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door, is due out Nov. 10. (Courtesy Photo)
Jamie Siminoff has lived the American Dream in many ways — recovering from an unsuccessful appearance on Shark Tank to ultimately sell smart doorbell company Ring to Amazon for a reported $1 billion in 2018.
“I never set out to write a book, but after a decade of chaos, failure, wins, and everything in between, I realized this is a story worth telling,” Siminoff said in the announcement, describing Ding Dong as the “raw, true story” of building Ring, including nearly running out of money multiple times.
He added, “My hope is that it gives anyone out there chasing something big a little more fuel to keep going. Because sometimes being ‘too dumb to fail’ is exactly what gets you through.”
Siminoff rejoined the Seattle tech giant earlier this year after stepping away in 2023. He’s now vice president of product, overseeing the company’s home security camera business and related devices including Ring, Blink, Amazon Key, and Amazon Sidewalk.
AI voice startup WellSaid Labs is doubling down on its niche of enterprise customers and regulated industries — hoping that a more judicious, behind-the-scenes approach will pay off for its business in the long run even as flashier rivals draw widespread attention and controversy.
The company, based in Bellevue, Wash., launched a new version of its text-to-speech AI voice platform Monday with redesigned Studio software and its next-generation Caruso voice model, promising better workflows, improved audio quality, and fine-tuned controls, among other features.
Unlike open voice-generation models that scrape public data, WellSaid’s system is trained exclusively on licensed voice actor recordings, a closed-model approach that it says respects intellectual property and appeals to sectors such as healthcare, legal, and finance.
WellSaid’s latest release is a pivotal moment for the company — the result of years of internal research now coming to market in a form that refines its focus on business and institutional users, said Chris Johnson, WellSaid’s chief product and technology officer, in an interview.
Chris Johnson, WellSaid’s chief product and technology officer. (WellSaid Photo)
“We put our stake in the ground in being the best solution for enterprises in the market,” Johnson said. “A lot of these innovations accrue to making that a reality for us.”
WellSaid, which spun out of Seattle’s AI2 Incubator in 2019, works with large enterprise customers including LinkedIn, T-Mobile, ServiceNow, and Accenture.
The company made an impression on the public in 2023 when NPR’s Planet Moneyused WellSaid’s technology to create a synthetic version of former host Robert Smith’s voice — a near-perfect replica that surprised listeners and showed both the promise and potential challenges of realistic AI audio.
But WellSaid has struggled at times to break into the larger industry conversation. The challenge was underscored by its absence from a CB Insights market map of leading voice-AI startups — topped by buzzy ElevenLabs, which has been at the center of controversy over the use of its technology to make fake AI voices of public figures and others.
WellSaid executives say they’re hoping to correct that specific oversight, but the challenge reflects a broader pattern among enterprise AI companies, particularly those in the Seattle region — which often emphasize trust, governance, and regulatory scenarios in a tech culture still captivated by headline-generating Silicon Valley experiments and consumer apps.
A spokesperson said enterprise customers are WellSaid’s fastest-growing segment, expanding six-fold in three years with net retention of more than 150%. Its business model is lean, having raised about $20 million, letting it run efficiently while paying voice actors royalties and offering an equity program. The company employs about 70 people, down slightly from a year ago, according to LinkedIn data.
WellSaid says it’s seeing new momentum in the application of its AI technology to advertising, due to an increase in voice quality and a decrease in related content production costs.
The company has seen some turnover in its executive suite, including three CEOs in less than two years — starting with founder Matt Hocking (who is still chairman), then Brian Cook, and now Benjamin Dorr, who succeeded Cook earlier this year after serving as chief financial officer.
“Every voice is connected to a real person, and that person receives royalties from the revenue that’s generated on WellSaid,” Dorr said on a recent episode of the Master Move podcast. “I think the things we do right by our voice actors allow us to do right by the enterprises that choose us, and I don’t think everyone else can say that.”
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