Amazon licenses its AI shopping technology to retailers through new AWS service

Amazon starts selling its AI shopping technology to other retailers

An Amazon device is displayed at an Amazon Devices launch event in New York City on Feb. 26, 2025. Amazon has been using homegrown artificial intelligence technology to help users compare products and buy or reorder items on their behalf. Now the company is licensing that technology to other retailers, as it vies to be the backbone of AI shopping across the web. In a blog post Wednesday, Amazon said it's taking the "architecture, starter code and learnings" from Alexa for Shopping and packaging it together for the rest of the retail industry. The new service allows retailers to launch their own AI shopping tools tailored to their storefront, catalog and branding "in as little as 60 days," Amazon said. For Amazon, the move marks another effort to take technology built internally and sell it to other companies, including competitors, as a service. It's the approach Amazon took roughly two decades ago with Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing unit, and later with its cashier-less checkout, warehousing and supply chain services. Earlier this month, Amazon rebranded its e-commerce chatbot from Rufus to Alexa for Shopping and enabled it by default in search queries on its store. As it turns outward, the new tool is being offered by AWS, which could help reassure retailers leery of partnering and sharing data with the industry giant. Amazon said it's already signed up Tapestry-owned luxury fashion brand Kate Spade as a customer, which used the service to launch a gifting assistant. Additional retailers are "currently in testing," the company said. Across the burgeoning AI industry, leading players are targeting shoppers. OpenAI, Google and Perplexity have rolled out research tools and agents for shopping, though some of those efforts have stumbled due to technical bugs or challenges with onboarding retailers. It's also unclear if shoppers are ready to hand off the task of completing a purchase to bots. Retailers and marketplaces like Walmart, Target, Etsy, Gap and eBay have taken a multipronged approach to AI shopping by building their own tools while also partnering with OpenAI and Google. Software companies like Salesforce have pitched services to help retailers launch chatbots or agents on their sites. Amazon has been reluctant to partner with rival AI platforms, opting instead to focus on building internal tools like Alexa for Shopping. It's also walled off its site from being scraped by external agents. Meanwhile, Amazon built a feature called Buy for Me that can make purchases for users on other retailers' websites. In Wednesday's post, Amazon suggested retailers build their own AI tools, rather than relinquishing control of the shopping experience to "an intermediary." "Retailers already possess deep vertical knowledge about their products, customers, and categories that no general-purpose AI can match," the company said.

Amazon offers its AI shopping tech to outside retailers in new phase of agentic commerce race

Amazon's cloud division announced an AI shopping assistant for retailers, following the company's broader blueprint of turning its internal technology into products for others. The new tool from Amazon Web Services, the AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant, is built on the same technology that powers the Alexa for Shopping assistant on Amazon.com, formerly known as Rufus, which the company says drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales last year. It's designed to let retailers create AI assistants for their own e-commerce sites that can talk with shoppers, answer questions about products, and make recommendations tailored to each store's inventory and brand. AWS says a retailer can get one up and running in about 60 days. The announcement is the latest move in the broader competition among tech giants to control different pieces of the AI shopping experience. * Google is building shopping features into its AI-powered search results, and has also partnered with Shopify on an open commerce standard to let AI agents interact with merchant checkout systems. * Microsoft has added checkout tools to its Copilot assistant and has been working with retailers like Ralph Lauren on custom AI shopping experiences. * OpenAI has been working with Shopify and Walmart to surface products in ChatGPT after its initial Instant Checkout feature fell flat. * Walmart last year launched its own AI shopping assistant, nicknamed Sparky, and has since integrated it into ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, betting on being present across AI platforms. With its new release, AWS is betting that retailers will want to build their own AI shopping experiences, while leveraging the experience of Amazon's own e-commerce platform. The stakes are significant. Accenture estimates that by 2030, more than 30% of online commerce could run through AI agents, representing about $3.1 trillion in transactions. Amazon's pitch requires retailers to trust its cloud division with their AI shopping infrastructure, even as Amazon's retail arm competes against them for customers. AWS says retailers using the AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant will keep control of their own customer data, product catalogs, and business rules, with each deployment customized to the retailer's brand. An early retail customer is Kate Spade, the fashion and accessories brand. Its parent company, Tapestry, used the tool to launch an AI gift concierge in April that engages shoppers in conversation about the occasion, recipient, and style before recommending products. Amazon says the concierge was built on Anthropic's Haiku 4.5 model through Amazon Bedrock, and went through roughly 2.5 months of testing before going live.

Amazon sells its AI shopping tech to retailers via AWS

The AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant packages the architecture behind Alexa for Shopping, which drove $12 billion in incremental sales last year, into a solution that other retailers can deploy in roughly 60 days Amazon Web Services has launched a product that lets retailers build their own AI-powered shopping assistants using the same technology that powers Amazon's Alexa for Shopping. The AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant packages architecture guidance, starter code, and hands-on support from AWS's Generative AI Innovation Center into a solution that the company says can be deployed in roughly 60 days. Kate Spade is the first retailer to go live. On 13 April, Tapestry, the parent company of Kate Spade, Coach, and Stuart Weitzman, launched an AI Gift Concierge on KateSpade.com. The tool engages shoppers in conversational dialogue about occasion, recipient, and style, then translates that into curated product recommendations. Tapestry describes it as the first production-ready retail AI assistant built with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Additional retailers are currently testing the solution. The Gift Concierge runs on Anthropic's Haiku 4.5 model through Amazon Bedrock, with AgentCore providing authentication, observability, and evaluation tooling. The Tapestry team spent roughly two and a half months in rigorous testing before making it customer-facing. Yang Lu, Tapestry's chief information and digital officer, said at launch that AWS provided the recipe, but the company built the customisation its consumers needed. The business case Amazon is making to retailers is straightforward. Amazon's own AI shopping assistant, which merged its Rufus chatbot and Alexa+ into a unified Alexa for Shopping experience earlier this month, was used by more than 300 million customers last year and drove $12 billion in incremental sales. Conversational shopping sessions convert at 3.5 times the rate of traditional keyword search, according to Amazon's data. AWS is now offering other retailers access to the learnings from that system without requiring them to spend years building one from scratch. Each deployment is customised to match a retailer's specific catalogue, customer base, shopping environment, and brand voice. Retailers bring their own product data, business rules, and domain expertise. AWS provides the technical foundation, which is built on Amazon Bedrock, AgentCore, and OpenSearch, and has been validated through billions of shopping interactions on Amazon.com. Amazon describes itself as "Customer Zero" for the solution, meaning every component has been tested in its own retail environment first. The launch sits within a competitive scramble to control the infrastructure layer of AI-powered commerce. Stripe has positioned its Agentic Commerce Suite as the payment rail for AI agents, with Shared Payment Tokens that let agents initiate purchases without exposing card credentials. OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT with Stripe and released an open-source Agentic Commerce Protocol. Google announced Universal Cart at I/O 2026, combining AI-powered shopping across Search, Gemini, and YouTube with an updated Agent Payments Protocol. Amazon's approach differs from its competitors in a critical way. Where Stripe, Google, and OpenAI are building intermediary layers between consumers and merchants, AWS is selling the tools for retailers to build their own AI shopping presence. The pitch is that retailers should own the customer relationship rather than cede it to a general-purpose AI that may not understand their brand, their products, or their customers as well as they do. That argument resonates with a specific anxiety in retail. As AI agents become the primary interface for purchase decisions, retailers that do not have their own conversational shopping capability risk becoming dependent on platforms they do not control. A specialty retailer knows its products better than any intermediary. A restaurant chain understands its menu and customer preferences in ways no general-purpose assistant can replicate. AWS ASA is designed to let those retailers act on that knowledge. The 60-day deployment timeline is aggressive but plausible given the managed nature of the solution. AWS's Generative AI Innovation Center provides hands-on guidance throughout, and system integrator partners are available for more complex deployments. For context, Amazon says it took years to develop the technology internally. Packaging it as a deployable solution compresses that timeline but still requires retailers to invest in integration, testing, and customisation for their specific use cases. Amazon can afford to be generous with the technology because it benefits either way. AWS reported $37.6 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2026, growing 28% year over year, its fastest rate in more than three years. Every retailer that deploys ASA runs it on AWS infrastructure, using Bedrock, AgentCore, and OpenSearch. The AI shopping assistant is both a product and a customer acquisition tool for the broader AWS ecosystem. The Anthropic partnership underpins the strategy. Amazon has invested up to $25 billion in Anthropic, and Bedrock is the primary distribution channel for Claude models to enterprise customers. Kate Spade's Gift Concierge running on Haiku 4.5 is a concrete example of how that investment translates into real-world deployments. Every retailer that chooses Bedrock for its AI shopping assistant generates inference revenue that flows through the Amazon-Anthropic relationship. The question is whether retailers will trust their fiercest competitor with this kind of integration. Amazon is simultaneously the largest online retailer in the world and the cloud provider selling AI shopping tools to other retailers. The same company that competes with Kate Spade for handbag sales is now providing the AI engine behind Kate Spade's shopping experience. AWS has long navigated this tension, hosting competitors like Netflix and Airbnb on its infrastructure, but selling AI that directly shapes the shopping experience is a more intimate relationship than hosting servers. For now, the early signal from Tapestry suggests at least some retailers are willing to make that trade. The alternative, building a comparable system independently, is prohibitively expensive and slow. And the competitive threat from AI intermediaries like ChatGPT and Google's Universal Cart is immediate. If a retailer's products are being recommended by an AI agent it does not control, with no brand voice, no domain expertise, and no direct customer relationship, the case for building its own AI shopping presence becomes urgent regardless of who provides the tools.

AWS launches AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant to help retailers build AI tools - SiliconANGLE

AWS launches AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant to help retailers build AI tools Amazon Web Services Inc. today introduced a new offering designed to help retailers integrate artificial intelligence features into their online stores. AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant, or ASA, combines several of the cloud giant's AI products with professional services. ASA is derived from a tool called Alexa for Shopping tool that Amazon.com Inc. added to its e-commerce marketplace this month. The tool enables users to generate product comparisons, check how an item's price has changed over time and perform related tasks. It replaced an existing set of AI features that Amazon says drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales last year. One of the AWS services that underpin ASA is Amazon Bedrock. It provides access to cloud-based foundation models developed by the Amazon unit and its partners. Last year, AWS extended the service with an AI agent development toolkit called Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. The company stated today that ASA makes use of the toolkit. The newly launched service also incorporates OpenSearch, an open-source search engine. AWS offers a managed version of the software that removes the need for developers to maintain the underlying infrastructure. AI shopping assistants like those ASA is designed to power can use OpenSearch to find product information requested by users. According to AWS, the professional services included in ASA will be provided by systems integrators and a business unit called the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center. The unit will help retailers customize the service for their requirements. Staffers from the Generative AI Innovation Center can adapt AI assistants to a company's design guidelines, brand voice and product catalog. Additionally, the unit will implement guardrails to prevent chatbots from generating irrelevant output. An electronics retailer, for example, may wish to prevent an AI assistant built into its website from generating erroneous device repair advice. The Generative AI Innovation Center will also develop other code customizations. According to Amazon, it can build workflows that enable an AI assistant to personalize responses based on a shopper's chat history. Additionally, a retailer could commission analytics tools that monitor the output quality of its ASA-powered chatbots. Building a custom AI application from scratch can take years in some cases. According to Amazon, ASA compresses that process to about 60 days.

Amazon Offers Alexa Shopping Assistant Blueprint to Retailers | PYMNTS.com

"Each deployment is customized to match the retailer's brand voice and domain expertise," AWS said in the release. "Retailers get the technical foundation from architecture guidance, starter code and support from AWS experts and system integrator partners, allowing them to launch their own conversational shopping experiences in weeks -- rather than the years it would take starting from scratch." Amazon announced Alexa for Shopping May 13, saying this personalized AI assistant combines the product expertise of the company's AI shopping assistant Rufus, which was used by 300 million customers in 2025, and the personalized knowledge and context of its voice assistant Alexa+, which is available on hundreds of millions of devices. One early adopter of ASA on AWS is Tapestry, the parent company of Kate Spade. The company used the solution to build the Kate Spade AI Gift Concierge, according to the Wednesday press release. The Kate Spade AI Gift Concierge engages shoppers in natural dialogue about their planned gift purchases, including the occasion, the recipient and the style, to help them select a gift. "We are excited about the possibilities agentic commerce can bring to our customers," Yang Lu, chief information and digital officer at Tapestry, said in the release. "AWS brought the recipe, but together we built the customization our consumers needed." The PYMNTS Intelligence report "The AI On-Ramp: Data Shows How Everyday Tasks Build Consumer Habits" found that "finding product links" is one of the activities for which AI is most often used. The report found that 31.4% of consumers used AI for that task in February. Consumers of all ages, incomes and genders use AI for finding product links. Whether someone earns $35,000 a year or $175,000 a year, they use the technology to find products and compare options, according to the report. "The AI value proposition, surfacing relevant links faster than a conventional search would, is legible to both," the report said.

Amazon Offers Shopping AI Tool to Other Retailers

Amazon Web Services is now offering its agentic AI shopping tool to retail brands. The Amazon.com cloud computing platform said the tool will help retailers build their own AI-powered shopping experiences. The offer follows the success of Amazon's own Alexa for Shopping assistant, which drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales just in 2025, the company said. Giving retailers their own AI assistant will help drive more customers to make purchases, Amazon said. Customers are more than three times more likely to make a purchase using an AI assistant compared with traditional keyword search bars, it said. The tool, called Agentic Shopping Assistant, can help retailers get their own AI agents off the ground in about 60 days rather than building the technology themselves from scratch, according to Amazon. The tool has already been used by fashion brand Kate Spade.