AWS Offers Retailers AI Shopping Assistant Powered by Alexa Tech Amazon is moving from using AI solely to power its own marketplace to selling that same technology to the very retailers it competes with online, accelerating a shift toward conversational shopping assistants embedded in individual brand sites.

Timeline: From Alexa for Shopping to a Retail Product

On May 27, Amazon Web Services (AWS) formally unveiled the Agentic Shopping Assistant (ASA), a package that lets retailers build their own AI shopping tools using the same technology behind Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping. The ASA bundles architecture guidance, starter code, and support from AWS’s Generative AI Innovation Center, with AWS saying retailers can deploy in “roughly 60 days.”

The move follows Amazon’s internal consolidation of its Rufus chatbot and Alexa+ into a unified Alexa for Shopping interface earlier in the month, used by more than 300 million customers last year and credited with $12 billion in incremental sales.

On April 13, ahead of the public ASA announcement, Kate Spade’s parent company Tapestry quietly became the first production customer, launching an “AI Gift Concierge” on KateSpade.com.

How the Tech Works for Retailers

The Gift Concierge engages shoppers in dialogue about occasion, recipient, and style, then turns that into curated product suggestions, running on Anthropic’s Haiku 4.5 model via Amazon Bedrock and AgentCore. Amazon says the broader AI shopping interface can provide personalized recommendations with images and pricing and answer store policy questions for any retailer that plugs in its catalog and rules.

Competing Visions of Control

AWS pitches ASA as a way for brands to avoid ceding customer relationships to “generic bots” and third‑party answer engines that might surface competitors, instead “handing the keys of Amazon’s own proven ecosystem directly to brands.” Each deployment is customized to a retailer’s catalog, customer base, and brand voice, while Amazon supplies the technical foundation built on Bedrock, AgentCore, and OpenSearch.

At the same time, Amazon is positioning itself as the underlying infrastructure for AI commerce across the web, offering access to its Alexa for Shopping tech so that “other online stores” can build their own chatbots and keep pace with the shift to conversational shopping.

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