Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made a very strategic quote regarding the company's future of working with third-party AI companies. Jassy said:
“We’re also having conversations with and expect, over time, to partner with third-party agents. Today, search engines are a very small part of our referral traffic, and third-party agents are a very small subset of that. But I do think that we will find ways to partner.”
His statement strategically counters the conversation that Amazon is unwilling to partner with third-party agents and subsequently falling behind to Shopify, Walmart, and other marketplaces by not partnering with OpenAI, while simultaneously downplaying the actual impact of those partnerships.
Basically Jassy is saying — “We're open to it in the future under the right terms, but we're not really missing out on anything right now by not playing monkey-see, monkey-do.”
Amazon's got something that all those companies don't have combined:
- Almost a quarter billion Prime members subscribed worldwide.
- An incomparable fulfillment & logistics network that offers shipping cost and speeds inaccessible to most Shopify merchants.
- Brand loyalty and consumer habits that took decades to earn them a 60% market share as the starting point for shopping amongst U.S. consumers.
Then again, Jassy might be intentionally minimizing how much of Amazon's traffic comes from search engines, which Similarweb estimates to be around 14%.
Do you think holding off on partnering with third-party AI shopping agents will ultimately be the right long term move for Amazon? Join the conversation on LinkedIn.