Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call that while Amazon expects to work with “horizontal agents” eventually, he believes Alexa for Shopping will be the agent most people rely on when they shop on Amazon. Amazon said more than 400M customers used Alexa for Shopping over the past 12 months, but it hasn’t disclosed how many purchases the assistant actually handles. In the meantime, Amazon has blocked shopping agents from Meta, Google, OpenAI and Perplexity over the past few months, arguing that bots which don’t identify themselves are a security risk to shopper accounts. Shopify went the other direction the day before the call, adding Shop Pay checkout to third-party agents including Claude Duet, Grok Bot, Muse and Instinct.
