Amazon introduces Amelia, an AI assistant for third-party sellers
Amelia is the latest generative AI product from Amazon, which is using the technology across its retail portfolio.
Amazon is rolling out an artificial intelligence tool designed to help third-party sellers quickly resolve issues with their accounts and fetch sales and inventory data.
The company said Thursday that it's launching the product, called Amelia, in beta for select U.S. sellers, before introducing it more broadly later this year. Amazon describes it as an "all-in-one, generative-AI based selling expert," and is making it accessible through Seller Central, the internal dashboard for third-party merchants.
Amelia is the latest generative AI tool that Amazon has brought to market in the past year as it seeks to capitalize on the hype sparked by OpenAI's ChatGPT. The company has introduced an AI-powered shopping assistant named Rufus, a chatbot for businesses dubbed Q and Bedrock, a generative AI service for cloud customers.
Amazon also plans to upgrade its Alexa voice assistant with generative AI features, CNBC previously reported, and the company has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI competitor Anthropic, its largest venture deal to date.
CEO Andy Jassy told investors earlier this year that the "generative AI opportunity" is almost unprecedented and that increased capital spending is necessary to take advantage of it.
"I don't know if any of us has seen a possibility like this in technology in a really long time, for sure since the cloud, perhaps since the internet," Jassy said on the company's first-quarter earnings call in April.
Google and Microsoft have introduced rival products to try to ensure their relevance in a market that's predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
AI has also become more prevalent across Amazon's e-commerce platform. The company now displays AI-generated summaries of product reviews and it's launched AI features for third-party sellers that can help them write listings and generate photos for ads.
Amazon also said Thursday it's launching tools that let sellers create AI-generated video ads and use AI to write product listings in bulk based on their entire catalog. The company said it's beginning to use generative AI to show personalized product recommendations and listings based on a user's shopping history. For instance, Amazon would show the term "gluten free" in the description for a box of cereal if a shopper typically searches for products with that phrase.
Amazon made the announcements at its annual conference for sellers hosted in Seattle. Third-party sellers are the heartbeat of Amazon's dominant e-commerce business. Since about 2017, they've accounted for at least half of all goods sold on the site. In the second quarter of this year, that number swelled to 61%.
Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon's vice president of worldwide selling partner services, told CNBC in an interview that a growing number of merchants are using its AI services. More than 400,000 of Amazon's millions of third-party sellers have used its AI listing tool, up from 200,000 in June, he said.
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