Amazon Opens AI Shopping Tech to Outside Retailers
Amazon is taking its proprietary AI shopping stack outside its own walls, CNBC reported Wednesday, offering the underlying architecture to competing retailers through Amazon Web Services.
The company published a blog post announcing the service, which packages the code, structure, and operational learnings behind Alexa for Shopping — Amazon’s recently rebranded e-commerce agent — into a toolkit retailers can deploy under their own branding.
What the New Service Offers
Amazon says retailers can launch a fully customised AI shopping assistant, tuned to their own product catalogue and storefront identity, in roughly 60 days. The first confirmed customer is Kate Spade, the Tapestry-owned fashion label, which used the service to build a gifting assistant.
Amazon noted that additional merchants are already in a testing phase, though it did not name them. Routing the offering through AWS is a deliberate signal to retailers wary of handing data directly to a marketplace that also competes with them.
A Playbook Amazon Has Used Before
The move echoes a strategy Amazon has executed repeatedly over two decades. The company built AWS itself from infrastructure assembled to run its own retail operations. It later commercialised cashier-less checkout technology and warehousing and supply-chain services through the same outward-facing model.
Earlier in May, Amazon rebranded its Rufus shopping chatbot as Alexa for Shopping and switched it on by default within search queries on its platform. Wednesday’s announcement accelerates that pivot by making the same underlying engine available industry-wide.
A Crowded Race for AI Shopping
The competitive backdrop is intensifying. OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have each rolled out consumer-facing shopping agents, though some have encountered bugs or struggled to bring merchants onto their platforms. Retailers including Walmart, Target, Gap, and Etsy have pursued a parallel approach, combining proprietary AI builds with partnerships from major model providers.
Amazon has conspicuously avoided partnering with rival AI platforms, preferring to build its own stack and keep its marketplace data walled off from external agents. The company’s new messaging frames that position as a virtue, arguing in Wednesday’s post that retailers hold deep product and customer knowledge that no general-purpose AI model can replicate — and that outsourcing the shopping experience to a third-party intermediary is a risk worth avoiding.
Whether that pitch lands will depend on how many merchants trust the company enough to build on its infrastructure even as it remains a direct competitor.
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