Noelle RussellChief Executive Officer, AI Leadership Institute · 5x Microsoft Trustworthy AI MVP | 3.4+ million students | #1 Thought Leader in Agentic AI | AI-Powered Revenue Growth + Cost Optimization Expert ✨Best-Selling Author: Scaling Responsible AI | TEDx Sp

Believe in Your Vision

29 Mar 2025 · 1 min

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Noelle Russell pushed back against the idea that Alexa was just a luxury kitchen gadget. With encouragement from a colleague named Jeff, she built a series of kindness skills for the device—Christmas kindness, couples kindness—that became unexpectedly popular and showed what voice assistants could do when designed for empathy.

Chapters

Back then we thought Alexa was only in the kitchen and it was for affluent, dual-income couples who had nothing better to do with their money than buy a device they could talk to in their kitchen. And I, of course, was like, "Could we maybe think about kids, classrooms, nursing homes?" Like all these things that they're like, "No, no, we do not need that." And I was like, "Jeff said I could, so I'm gonna." So I built it and it took off. So that skill ended up doing really well. I built a, a bunch of kindness skills, Christmas kindness, couples kindness. It was amazing.