Amazon starts selling its AI shopping technology to other retailers

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.

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