Amazon is stuffing generative AI into its shopping experience

Amazon has introduced a batch of new generative AI tools that aim to improve the retail experience for both customers and sellers on the platform. One of the more notable features announced at the Amazon Accelerate event on Thursday will use customers’ preferences, search, browsing, and purchase history to create personalized product recommendations on Amazon’s homepage.

Instead of the “more like this” feature that suggests similar, specific items, the new recommendations will be offered as larger categories based on a customer’s shopping habits — such as those catering to holiday events or sporting activities. The company says it’s leveraging a large language model to recommend products with specific features, but it’s not clear how different this will be from the current user experience.

The feature will also curate more relevant product descriptions around user interests. Terms like “gluten-free” will appear more prominently in the descriptions of relevant products for customers who regularly search for gluten-free items, for example.

Some new tools being released for third-party sellers on the platform include a free video generator tool that references a product’s image and features to produce AI-generated clips. The company says this feature was developed to make video marketing more accessible and cost-effective, citing a study from animated video firm Wyzowl that found 89 percent of consumers want to see more videos from brands.

A new 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 mugs or a breeze that makes plants sway. Amazon says that both the live image and new video generator are available now in beta to select US advertisers, where they’ll be fine-tuned before wider release.

Also launching in beta is “Project Amelia,” a chatbot that provides personalized recommendations, insights, and troubleshooting assistance, geared at improving business performance for third-party Amazon retailers. For example, when sellers ask Project Amelia how their business is doing, the chatbot will respond with a summary of sales data, website traffic, and year-over-year performance comparisons. Amazon says the beta, which is currently limited to a small group of US retailers, will expand to additional US sellers “in the coming weeks” and roll out to additional countries later this year.

This is a sizable batch of generative AI updates for Amazon, which has otherwise been lagging behind larger players in the industry like Meta and Google. According to Reuters, Amazon will be using Anthropic’s Claude AI to power upcoming Alexa improvements after finding its own AWS models struggled with words and responding to user prompts.