Amazon packages are prepared for delivery at Amazon’s robotic fulfillment centers.
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Amazon It’s rolling out artificial intelligence tools designed to help third-party sellers quickly resolve account issues and get sales and inventory data.
The company said Thursday it is releasing the product, called Amelia, in beta to select sellers in the U.S. before rolling it out more broadly later this year. Amazon describes it as an “all-in-one, generative AI-based selling expert” and makes it accessible through Seller Central, its internal dashboard for third-party sellers.
Amelia is the latest generative AI tool that Amazon has brought to market in the past year, as it seeks to capitalize on the frenzy sparked by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company has also introduced its AI-powered shopping assistant Rufus, its enterprise chatbot Q, and its generative AI service Bedrock for its cloud customers.
Amazon also plans to upgrade its Alexa voice assistant with generative AI capabilities, and the company is investing billions of dollars in OpenAI competitor Anthropic, marking the company’s largest venture deal to date, CNBC previously reported.
CEO Andy Jassy told investors earlier this year that the “generative AI opportunity” is nearly unprecedented and that increasing capital spending will be needed to capitalize on it.
“I don’t know if we’ve seen anything like this in technology for a long time, since the cloud, maybe since the internet,” Jassy said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call in April.
Andy Jassy onstage at the 2022 New York Times DealBook on November 30, 2022 in New York City.
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Google and Microsoft The company has introduced competing products to strengthen its presence in a market that is expected to exceed $1 trillion in sales within a decade.
AI is also becoming more prevalent on Amazon’s e-commerce platform: The company now displays AI-generated summaries of product reviews and has also launched AI features to help third-party sellers write product listings and generate photos for ads.
Amazon on Thursday also announced it would release tools that would allow merchants to create AI-generated video ads and use AI to bulk-create product listings based on their entire catalog. The company said it is starting to use generative AI to show personalized product recommendations and listings based on users’ shopping history. For example, Amazon will show the phrase “gluten-free” in the description of a cereal box if a shopper typically searches for a product that contains that phrase.
Amazon made the announcement at its annual merchant conference in Seattle. Third-party sellers are at the heart of Amazon’s core e-commerce business: Since about 2017, at least half of all items sold on the site have come from third-party sellers. In the second quarter of this year, that number grew to 61%.
Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide seller partner services, said in an interview with CNBC that more sellers are using the company’s AI services: Of Amazon’s millions of third-party sellers, more than 400,000 are using the company’s AI selling tools, up from 200,000 in June.
With Amelia, Amazon is using generative AI to help troubleshoot accounts, a key issue for third-party sellers. The company has a large team that helps sellers resolve account suspensions, address inventory issues, and build their business on the site. Sellers have long complained about the difficulty of getting a quick resolution or reaching a human when unexpected issues surface with their accounts.
The company says Amelia can help investigate account issues and, in the future, “solve issues on behalf of sellers.” Instead of sellers having to fill out inventory forms, Mehta explained, they could ask Amelia to file a claim on their behalf, or the tool could solve the issue automatically.
“Instead of having to chat with merchant support or talk to someone on the phone, there will be a place where Amelia can do that faster,” Mehta said. “You don’t have to email someone and wait for a response.”
Amazon said Amelia uses Bedrock, a software tool that gives users access to large-scale language models from Amazon and other companies, including Anthropic and Stability AI. Mehta said Amelia is trained on public data from the web, as well as information pulled from Amazon’s seller resources, FAQs and other public-facing websites.
Mehta said the model was not trained on closely held merchant-specific data.
Amazon says the tool uses Search Augmentation and Generative (RAG), a popular framework in the AI industry that combines generative AI with long-established information retrieval methods, to pull information specific to a given merchant from Amazon’s internal systems, without storing that information or including it in the model’s training data.
