Amazon’s move to sell its agentic shopping architecture to rival retailers via AWS follows its established pattern of commercializing internal infrastructure — and extends its AI layer into storefronts that compete directly with its own marketplace.
Amazon has brought its agentic AI up to date for customers, combining two services into one and expanding the capabilities. But it has also bundled its gleanings from customer-facing AI into a package for retailers to deploy themselves.
For consumers the e-tail giant has released in the US what it calls Alexa for Shopping, through the Amazon Shopping app, the Amazon website and Echo Show (the combined speaker and touchscreen for Alexa). The new service combines Rufus, Amazon’s generative-AI shopping assistant (a chat) and Alexa+, the generative-AI version of Alexa.
Alexa for Shopping can grab product information from Amazon itself as well as from the internet. It can draw from users’ preferences, shopping history on Amazon and conversations with Alexa. In addition, users can query the Amazon search bar through the AI, have the AI generate “dynamic product comparisons,” view a year’s worth of price history, and automate deal-finding, cart building and routine purchases. No membership to Prime or Echo is necessary.
For retailers Amazon has established what it calls the Agentic Shopping Assistant (ASA) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This comprises the architecture, the starter code and “expert guidance.” “Retail customers,” Amazon goes on to say, “can combine this foundation with their own data, business rules, and brand voice to create conversational shopping assistants tailored to their needs.”
Amazon says its AI assistant was used by more than 300 million customers last year and generated a bit less than $12 billion in incremental sales.
According to a survey (PowerReviews) conducted in 2023 of 8,153 Americans (53% Millennials, 29% Gen X, 10% Boomers, 8% Gen Z), 50 percent of consumers start their product searches on Amazon.
