Amazon launches AI assistant to help online merchants prosper

Amazon.com Inc. is launching an artificially intelligent assistant designed to help online merchants manage their businesses.

Codenamed Project Amelia, the new tool will answer a range of questions, from how to prepare for the holiday shopping season to suggesting the wording of product listings, Amazon said Thursday during its annual Accelerate conference for merchants.

Amazon has been rolling out various AI tools amid intensifying competition with Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Open AI. One is a workplace chatbot called Amazon Q that helps corporate customers search for information, write code and review business metrics. Rufus lets consumers comparison shop and research products on Amazon's web store.

For the merchants, who account for most of the sales on Amazon retail sites, the company has introduced software designed to help them optimize product listings and create or modify images. On Thursday, Amazon said it would also give them tools to create product videos.

Amelia is available in beta for a subset of merchants and will be rolled out to all US sellers 'over roughly the next month," Dharmesh Mehta, an Amazon vice president who oversees seller services, said in an interview. Later this year, Amazon will start introducing Amelia to other countries and making it available in languages besides English.

The assistant is built atop Bedrock, a software platform designed to make it easier to access other companies' large language models, as well as Amazon's own. Mehta said Amelia had relied on a variety of different models through its development. He didn't specify which ones power it today.

Mehta conceded that sellers weren't clamoring for an AI chatbot specifically, but that Amazon thinks the tool can help simplify selling online. "The thing we hear from sellers regularly is, 'Hey Amazon, I've got to do a lot of things, figure out a lot of stuff to be successful and I want to be an expert in these because it really drives my business,'" he said.

In a video presentation at the conference, Mehta demonstrated Amelia surfacing bullet points about a seller's product line and offering recommendations. Over time, Amelia will provide a more personalized experience and become better at anticipating merchants' needs, he said. It will also grow more capable of taking action on a seller's behalf.

Amazon long ago began automating elements of the relationship with millions of third-party sellers, some of whom say they're at the mercy of algorithms that can suspend their accounts unfairly. In the video, Amazon demonstrated a seller asking a question about a product shipment that hadn't shown up in Amazon's records. If the software can't find the answer, it can connect sellers with Amazon's support teams.