Amazon Brings Generative AI to Its Shopping Experience

Amazon has rolled out a batch of recent generative AI tools aimed at improving the shopping experience for both customers and sellers on its platform. One of the more notable features announced at its Amazon Accelerate event on Thursday will leverage customer preferences, search, browsing and purchase history to create personalized product recommendations on the Amazon home page.

Instead of a “more like this” feature that suggests similar, specific items, the recent recommendations will be offered as larger categories based on a customer’s shopping habits — such as those related to holiday events or sporting activities. The company says it uses a immense language model to recommend products with specific attributes, but it’s unclear how much that will differ from the current user experience.

The feature will also create more relevant product descriptions based on user interests. Terms like “gluten-free” will be more noticeable in relevant product descriptions for customers who regularly search for gluten-free products, for example.

Some of the recent tools being made available on the platform to third-party sellers include: free video generator tool which references a product’s image and features to create AI-generated clips. The company says the feature was developed to make video marketing more accessible and cost-effective, citing research from animated video company Wyzowl that found 89 percent of consumers want to watch more videos from brands.

A recent live image feature is also being added to the image generator that Amazon introduced last year, allowing users to partially animate still images — such as adding steam to cups or a breeze swaying plants. Amazon says both the live image and the recent video generator are now available in beta to select advertisers in the U.S., where they will be fine-tuned before a wider launch.

Also launching in beta is “Project Amelia,” a chatbot that provides personalized recommendations, insights, and problem-solving assistance aimed at improving the business results of Amazon’s third-party retailers. For example, when sellers ask Project Amelia how they are doing in businessthe chatbot will respond with a summary of sales data, site traffic, and year-over-year comparisons. Amazon says the beta, which is currently circumscribed to a diminutive group of U.S. retailers, will expand to additional U.S. retailers “in the coming weeks” and roll out to more countries later this year.

It’s a hefty batch of generative AI updates for Amazon, which has so far lagged behind bigger industry players like Meta and Google. According to Reuters AgencyAmazon is set to exploit Anthropic’s Claude AI to aid it improve its Alexa app after discovering that its own AWS models were having trouble speaking and responding to user commands.