Key takeaways
- Amazon’s AI-powered innovations help customers find, discover, and evaluate products from our broad selection.
- We work backwards from the customer to solve online shopping pain points and offer a variety of convenient next-gen conversational, visual, and auditory tools to help customers shop in a way that feels most natural.
Amazon has been using AI to improve the customer shopping experience for over 25 years. What began as machine learning algorithms to recommend books has evolved into AI-powered tools that help customers quickly discover and evaluate products in our store.
Amazon now offers the broadest selection in retail, carrying hundreds of millions of products, including more than 300 million items available with fast, free delivery for Prime members, across more than 35 categories including home, apparel, beauty, grocery, and household essentials. We offer this vast selection because Amazon customers expect a wide variety of options, but evaluating products and making a choice can take time. Let’s say you’re shopping for a coffee maker in a physical store—you might find five to 10 models on the shelf. In Amazon’s store, there are many more coffee maker options available. For one customer, a red single-serving coffee maker with an easy to clean filter may make the most sense; for another customer, an industrial-sized stainless steel multi-purpose espresso machine may be the perfect choice. Our shopping experience is personalized and designed to help customers find and discover the products that are right for them, using signals including reviews, price, availability, delivery speed, return rates, and browsing and shopping history.
AI-powered search and discovery
Our traditional search bar has long connected customers to Amazon’s broad selection and low prices, helping them quickly find the right products while sparking exploration and discovery. Over the past couple of years, we have further refined our search capabilities using AI, and our systems now better understand the intent behind a customer’s search. It's not just about matching keywords anymore—it's understanding what customers are actually looking to buy. This AI-powered approach is more effective and more comprehensive, better understanding the full context of what shoppers want.
These advancements in our traditional search models have enabled us to rapidly grow and experiment in next-gen search experiences. Our new AI-powered features are making shopping even more convenient by helping customers discover and evaluate products in whatever way feels most natural to them. We take an iterative approach to building and launching these experiences, often rolling them out in beta to test and learn what resonates with customers. If another feature better solves a customer pain point, we evolve and move on quickly.
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Both our feature set and rate of customer adoption continue to grow. For example:
- More than 250 million customers have used Rufus this year; monthly users are up 140% YoY and interactions are up 210% YoY. Customers that use Rufus during a shopping journey are 60%+ more likely to convert.
- Review highlights receive hundreds of millions of impressions weekly, and customers who engage with review highlights have increased by 100% year over year.
- Hear the Highlights—which has expanded from hundreds of products at launch to millions of products currently—has been used by millions of customers who've streamed more than seven million minutes of content, with nearly half of all customers listening to full episodes.
- Nearly 20% of customers who created Interests added a recommended item to their cart.
- Photo searches in Amazon Lens have more than doubled since 2023, and the launch of Lens Live has increased engagement in Amazon Lens by 13%.
- Billions of personalized size recommendations are generated each month for customers.
- With Alexa+, we’re also seeing customers having deeper, more helpful shopping conversations, and when customers explore items, they are resulting in three times more on-device purchases compared to the classic Alexa.
- Products available to purchase through our agentic AI experience Buy for Me have increased from 65K at launch to over half a million presently, and we’re seeing positive customer response as we show selection found both on- and off-Amazon.
We use AI in many ways to make shopping in our store more convenient for customers—here are some of the ways customers are using AI-powered features to shop:
Rufus – The all-in-one AI assistant for shopping
Rufus, our AI assistant for shopping, helps you shop smarter by answering any shopping question, providing personalized recommendations based on your shopping history, tracking prices, shopping agentically on your behalf, and more.
- Use it when: You want to use an AI assistant purpose built for shopping that remembers your preferences, sets price alerts, purchase items for you, shops on-and off-Amazon brands, provides styling recommendations, compares items, reorders products, researches big purchases, digitizes handwritten lists, finds deals, and more.
- Sample questions: “Buy this dress when it drops to $75,” “Order both pairs of headphones I browsed yesterday,” “Are these golf clubs right for me?,” “Are any items on my wish list on sale?,” “Based on what you know about my daughter, recommend holiday gifts for her,” “Is this a good price?,” “Find a pair of pants that look like this image.”
- Find it: In the Amazon Shopping app (chat bubble with sparkles), on product detail pages via suggested questions, and in Amazon Lens Live.
AI for product recommendations and discovery
Interests
Interests lets you create personalized shopping prompts in your own words, then automatically notifies you when new products, restocks, or deals matching your specific prompt become available.
- Use it when: You have a mainstream or unique interest and want to be notified when new selection is available in Amazon’s store.
- Sample prompts: “Model building kits and accessories for hobbyist engineers and designers,” “latest pickleball gear and accessories,” “I'm looking for wall art to decorate my home. I want something abstract or modern made of black metal, not canvas. Maybe a geometric, minimalist piece. I'm into industrial-style decor that makes a statement, nothing too traditional or painted.”
- Find it: The Interests button in the Me tab (pictured above in the left image).
Amazon Lens and Lens Live
Amazon Lens is the fastest way to find visually similar items, and Lens Live instantly displays matching items and helpful information in camera view.
- Use it when: You spot an item in person or on social media and want to find a visually similar item.
- Use it on: As long as it’s available in Amazon’s store, anything!
- Find it: The camera icon in the search bar (pictured in the above left image).
Buy for Me
Buy for Me is an agentic AI service that can purchase select products on your behalf from brand websites if they aren’t sold in Amazon’s store.
- Use it when: You want to seamlessly purchase a product not available in Amazon’s store.
- Sample searches: “Calpak backpack,” “Jenni Kayne candle,” “Faherty sweater.”
- Find it: When you search for a brand in the Amazon Shopping app, you’ll see results found in Amazon’s store, and in some cases, additional relevant products from other stores labeled “Shop brand sites directly.” You can link directly to these sites, or in some cases, you’ll see a link to Buy for Me. You can also use Rufus to find items in the Buy for Me experience.
AI for product research and evaluation
Help Me Decide
Help Me Decide analyzes browsing activity, searches, shopping history, and preferences to quickly recommend the right product for you.
- Use it when: You’ve viewed several similar products and want a tailored purchase decision made for you
- Example: If you’re looking for a new tent and recently browsed cold-weather sleeping bags, looked at large stoves for car camping, and purchased hiking boots for kids, Help Me Decide may recommend an all-season, four-person tent that’s warm and spacious enough for the whole family’s upcoming adventure.
- Find it: If customers have browsed similar products but haven’t made a purchase, the “Help Me Decide” button will appear at the top of the product detail page, or in “Keep shopping for” on the homepage and Me tab.
Review highlights (Customers say)
Review highlights provide a short summary of customer sentiment based solely on the content from customer reviews, automatically updating as new feedback comes in.
- Use it when: You’ve zeroed in on a product and want to quickly understand what customers say without spending a lot of time reading reviews. When you click on a product aspect, e.g., “speed” in the image above, you can also see how many times customers have mentioned that aspect, positive and negative review sentiment, and direct quotes from customers about that aspect of the product.
- Find it: Directly above reviews on product detail pages where multiple customers have left reviews. You can also ask Rufus, “What do customers say?”
Hear the Highlights
Hear the Highlights are conversational audio summaries of product information, reviews, and information from across the web.
- Use it when: You prefer to listen or multitask rather than read product details, customer reviews, and additional product information.
- Examples: Keurig coffee maker, Ninja personal blender, rain shower head.
- Find it: On select product detail pages in the Amazon Shopping app directly under the product image.
Shopping Guides
Shopping Guides help you research product categories you may be unfamiliar with, explaining key features, clarifying confusing terminology, and consolidating important information.
- Use them when: You want to research an unfamiliar category.
- Sample categories: TVs, area rugs, dog food, running shoes, face moisturizers.
- Find them: Shopping Guides automatically appear in “Keep Shopping For” and at Amazon.com/guides.
Personalized size recommendations
Personalized size recommendations consider your fit preferences, product details, such as style, size chart, and customer reviews, to suggest the best size for you, helping you find styles you will love and want to keep.
- Use it when: You aren’t sure what size to purchase.
- Find it: On apparel and shoe detail pages underneath product images.
We believe AI is going to change virtually every customer experience we know. We value feedback from customers on our AI-powered shopping features, using it to guide our product roadmap and evolve features to best serve their needs. We will continue to test, learn, and develop features in our store that help customers discover and evaluate products, making shopping even more convenient.
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