Amazon warms up to outside AI agents

At Accelerate, Amazon’s annual conference for third-party sellers in Seattle, the e-commerce giant was focused on its Seller Assistant, which has been upgraded to include agentic AI capabilities, and Amazon executives talked about how they believe it is going to help brands run their business on the marketplace.

However, the big reveal of the show was Amazon’s announcement that it’s launching a plugin for its own assistant, Quick, and for Anthropic’s AI agent Claude. Amazon will now let merchants run their Amazon stores on Claude, the company said, without ever going into Seller Central, the main dashboard for merchant store data. It’s a move that hints at an evolution of Amazon’s stance on data sharing with tech companies like Anthropic and potentially other tech rivals like OpenAI which runs ChatGPT.

Plug and play: The plugin will connect a seller’s Amazon data, including their listings, real-time performance metrics, inventory levels, and sales analytics, directly to their Claude account, according to Amazon.

“Amazon has previously never come out with a concerted effort to tell their sellers what AI tools can be used to help run your Amazon business, nor provided an easy and simple way to link them up,” Ryan Craver, co-founder and chief strategy and AI officer at Podean, told Retail Brew, “and now they’ve done so.”

Rivals like Walmart and Target have struck AI deals with OpenAI and Google, among others, to figure out how to reach shoppers who are starting their shopping journey on AI agents like ChatGPT.

In the eyes of Katya Constantine, CEO of agency Digishopgirl Media, the broader pitch to sellers is that Amazon is incorporating AI in different areas of its business. “The AI functionality, whether it’s Quick or Seller Assistant, is to make it easier for brands to be self-sufficient and to troubleshoot on Seller Central,” she told Retail Brew.

Whether tQuick itself becomes a hit with sellers remains to be seen, but some early reactions to the news were positive.

“I thought it would take way longer for this to come to market because Amazon’s API set-up is chaotic and a pain to work with,” Stephen H, founder and CEO of The Lmo7 agency, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “But here we are, heading into Q4 with the ability to run your entire Amazon Seller business from Claude.”

Still, Craver said, Amazon is ultimately “playing catch up to what everyone’s been doing already.”

Full end-to-end supply chain: Amazon is also rolling out new multichannel tools in Seller Central that will let brands manage merchant orders and listings across Amazon, eBay, Shopify, TikTok, and Walmart in one place, instead of logging in separately for each.

The service is launching in a phased manner for US sellers, with more channels and features expected over the next few months, Amazon said in a blog post.