Amazon opens its AI shopping tech for business with retailers

Amazon’s recent pattern of building things that work internally and then selling them to rivals seems to continue with AI agents as well. The tech giant will let retailers build their own AI shopping assistants using the same technology that powered its Alexa for Shopping chatbot experience that brought together standalone AI agents Rufus and Alexa+.

On Wednesday, Amazon’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, launched the AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant (ASA), a new AI retail tool built on the same technology that drove nearly $12 billion in incremental revenue for Amazon last year. Amazon said retailers can plug this new tool in and get an AI agent up and running in roughly 60 days.

“ASA for AWS provides retailers with a faster path to launching their own AI shopping agents,” Gadjo Sevilla, senior analyst for the AI and tech desks at eMarketer, wrote in a blog post. “However, relying too heavily on a single provider also carries risks. As Amazon expands from retailer to AI agent provider, brands’ reliance on Amazon’s ecosystem for data, customer interactions, and commerce innovation builds outsized dependencies.”

About 68% of retailers expect AI agents to handle the bulk of online shopping in the next five years, per a study by Boston Consulting Group, which cited retailer data from software company Monday.com. Meanwhile, 63% of retailers said companies that don’t adopt AI agents get on board in the next two years risk falling behind.

Retailers will get the AWS technical foundation and code, plus hands-on help from AWS experts and partners to build and launch their own AI shopping assistants. In turn, Amazon will get first-party data from retailers that choose to use its technology to build agents.

Kate Spade is one of the first brands to try out the AWS ASA. Parent company Tapestry launched an AI Gift Concierge in April that chats with shoppers about the occasion, who they’re shopping for, and their style before suggesting products. Kate Spade’s AI agent was built on Anthropic’s Haiku 4.5 model via Amazon Bedrock and took about two and a half months to test before launching, Amazon said.

Last week, Amazon merged its standalone Rufus and Alexa assistants into a single AI shopping tool called Alexa for Shopping. The new agent goes beyond search and handles everything from price alerts and product comparisons to making purchases on behalf of Amazon shoppers. The Alexa-Rufus merger was Amazon’s first step toward owning the agentic AI tech layer.