Amazon Rufus: Amazon's AI shopping assistant gets smarter and more personal

Key takeaways

Rufus is an AI assistant in the Amazon Shopping app and website, powered by generative and agentic AI and built to make shopping faster and easier by providing customers with useful information and product recommendations.
Leveraging insights from each customer’s individual Amazon shopping activity, its predictive capabilities provide tailored answers and personalized product suggestions based on conversational context.
Built on Amazon Bedrock, it draws on advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) including Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet, Amazon Nova, and a custom-built model leveraging knowledge from Amazon’s extensive product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and information from across the web, to deliver next-gen generative and agentic AI experiences.

Since launching Rufus last year, we’ve been rapidly innovating to make it the best AI assistant for shopping. It’s now smarter, more capable, and more conversational and helpful. We’ve made significant intelligence, reasoning, and performance upgrades to its core capabilities. These updates include enhancing its general knowledge related to shopping, category and product research and evaluation, and product search and recommendations. We’ve introduced over 50 technical upgrades, enhancements, and new features to make it a faster, more useful, state-of-the-art shopping companion that saves customers time and money.

Our AI shopping assistant has helped customers billions of times, and we’ve made continuous enhancements to its underlying neural architecture while expanding its knowledge graph of product attributes and customer preferences. Using a real-time router, it leverages a mix of models accessed through Amazon Bedrock, which enables our AI assistant for shopping to quickly scale to serve hundreds of millions of users with flexible model selection, including Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet, Amazon Nova, and a custom model based on Amazon’s store knowledge across different query types to optimize for capability, latency, and answer quality. It also uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to glean insights and recommendations from popular sources like The New York Times, USA Today, Good Housekeeping, and Vogue when answering questions about products and trends.

Our AI assistant can solve customer problems and answer a wide range of questions at any stage of the shopping journey, demonstrating flexibility, intelligence, and multi-step reasoning. It can quickly and seamlessly handle everything from broad questions that inform a shopping trip (“What’s the weather in Rome in April?”) to highly specific questions about product details (“What’s the battery life on this product?”). This versatility allows our in-store shopping assistant to function as both a knowledgeable shopping consultant for high-level problem solving and product discovery, as well as a discerning product expert capable of providing comprehensive comparisons between similar items and answering granular product questions.

More than 250 million customers have used Rufus this year, with monthly average users up 149% and interactions up 210% over the past year. Customers who use it while shopping are over 60% more likely to make a purchase during that shopping trip. Our shopping assistant is easy for customers to find in our store, featured prominently in the Amazon Shopping app, on desktop, and throughout our store, such as on the homepage, product detail pages, and in the Amazon Lens Live experience. To start chatting with our AI assistant, you can type natural language queries into the AI assistant chat bar or tap on the microphone and speak.

Rufus AI interface showing questions the shopping assistant can answer

“We've built and keep improving our next-gen in-store AI assistant to be a knowledgeable shopping expert right at your fingertips—one that knows you and your preferences, can help you discover products, compare options and prices, make informed buying decisions, and even take action to get things done faster for you,” said Rajiv Mehta, vice president of Search and Conversational Shopping at Amazon. “Our goal is to save customers time and money by making online shopping even simpler with real-time information and insights of experts across the 35+ product categories in our store.”

A personalized experience based on your preferences and shopping patterns

Our AI assistant now has account memory, understanding customers based on their individual shopping activity. Whether you’re an avid trail runner, a budding artist, a fashionista, or a documentary film buff, it provides more personalized, relevant, and helpful answers and product search results based on this information. If you’ve previously shared you have 5- and 8-year-old sons who love sports, a golden retriever that sheds, or that you prefer organic produce, it remembers those details and considers them while generating answers and product search results. For example, if you ask Rufus about gifts to buy your kids for the holidays, it knows to recommend age-appropriate books about legendary sports athletes, sports-themed video games for the Xbox, and athletic apparel. If you’re asking questions about the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, our AI assistant will highlight how cleaning up pet hair is a key feature of the Roomba. Or, if you’re searching for groceries to make your favorite pasta recipe, it will prioritize selection of organic tomatoes.

Rufus AI chat interface recommending easy meals under 15 minutes

You can also chat with our AI assistant and ask it to reorder items you’ve browsed or shopped in the past, for example, “Reorder everything we used to make pumpkin pie last week,” or “Order the hiking boots and poles I browsed yesterday.” Rufus connects the dots between past activity and present shopping needs, even suggesting alternatives if items are unavailable, and leveraging agentic AI capabilities to automatically add items to your cart, which you can then review before checking out.

You can even ask it to share what shopping information it remembers about you, add new information to help inform its recommendations, and make any corrections—all via natural conversation—to continuously refine and improve the personalized experience. In addition to being aware of your shopping activity in our store, in the coming months, our AI assistant will also have memory of your activity across Amazon’s digital services such as Kindle, Prime Video, and Audible.

Rufus AI assistant adding pumpkin pie ingredients to shopping cart

Advanced text and visual search

Rufus has powerful new text and visual search features that help customers find inspiration and solve problems. Customers can search for and discover products based on activity, event, purpose, and other specific topics and use cases, whether finding what you need for a day of golf, baking a cake, hosting a holiday party, or getting school supplies for your third grader. Depending on how specific your search is, it either suggests shoppable product categories that you can quickly browse, or it will suggest specific items that you can ask it to quickly add to your cart. A search like, “What items do I need to host a Frozen-themed birthday party for my daughter?” will find everything from decorations, tableware, and cake decorations to games and party favors. You can select items one-by-one or ask it to automatically add all items to your cart.

Rufus AI shopping UI for recommending affordable formal dresses under $100

Our AI assistant can also help you quickly find inspiration from your favorite influencers’ storefronts by simply asking it to find a specific person, such as “Find Paige DeSorbo’s storefront.” You can also use it to discover products not currently found in Amazon’s store. When you type in a branded search, Rufus brings up products available on Amazon, and also products from other merchants. It either shows a “Buy for Me” button, which enables Amazon to agentically purchase the item on your behalf, or a “Shop Direct” button that directs you to the merchant’s website to evaluate and complete your purchase.

Rufus AI shopping assistant interface suggests pink laptop bags with purchase

For iOS customers who handwrite their grocery or holiday shopping lists, you can now snap a photo of your list, upload it, and our AI assistant will add the items directly into your Amazon shopping cart, with the capability on Android to follow. Soon, customers will also be able to upload and ask our AI assistant to find similar products or help solve a problem. For example, you can upload a photo of a stained rug and ask, “How do I remove this coffee stain from my rug?” Rufus will analyze the fabric of the rug and provide a tailored response highlighting the most relevant cleaning supplies.

Saving money through historical price tracking, price alerts and auto-buying, and deal finding

Our AI shopping assistant now shows a 30- and 90-day price tracker so customers can quickly evaluate past pricing and immediately understand if they are getting a great deal—simply ask Rufus for price history when browsing an item. Prime members can also set a price alert to be notified when a product hits a target price point, and if you want to be sure to lock in that price, you can ask our AI assistant to automatically buy the item for you. Our shopping assistant will check prices frequently on your behalf and complete the purchase agentically using your default payment method and shipping address, and send a notification with free 24-hour cancellation if you change your mind after the order is placed. Auto-buy requests stay active for six months or until you cancel, and customers are saving on average 20% per purchase.

You can also use our shopping assistant to easily search by price to home in on items that fit your budget—such as “Men’s jeans under $40” or “Best toys under $15.” Rufus is also a smart deal finder that can comb through Amazon’s vast selection to curate personalized deals every day of the year, including during events like Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. You can find the best deals storewide and in your favorite categories and get personalized offers inspired by your browsing, cart, and wish list activity.

Rufus AI interface displaying price alert settings for beauty item

Fast, simple customer service

Our AI assistant is also a 24/7 customer service expert that is able to help track packages and deliveries, help with order status questions, explain return and refund processes, guide you through replacements for damaged items, assist with order modifications, cancellations or returns, help navigate account settings, explain payment and billing questions, guide you through login and security issues, help you find the right support resources, and if needed, connect you with a live customer service representative.

Rufus AI chat showing Blue Bose headphones with 43% discount on Amazon.com

AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our time, and we are excited to continue invention on behalf of customers. We will continue rolling out and improving these experiences to make Rufus more helpful for customers. The next time you're shopping on Amazon, put our AI assistant to work and make your shopping experience even simpler, faster, and more fun.