Amazon Web Services launched Agentic Shopping Assistant, a new offering that helps third-party retailers build AI shopping features like search, product comparison, and customer support into their online stores, while keeping control of their own data.
The company wrote in its announcement:
“The solution provides a technical foundation with architecture guidance, starter code, and support from AWS experts and system integrator partners, allowing them to launch their own conversational shopping experiences in weeks—rather than the years it would take starting from scratch. It is tailored to each retailer's specific catalog, customer base, and shopping environment. Each deployment is customized to match the retailer's brand voice and domain expertise.”
The Agentic Shopping Assistant is built on AWS services such as Bedrock, AgentCore, and OpenSearch, and validated through real shopping interactions on Amazon.com, which the company says is “Customer Zero” for the product. The service is effectively the equivalent of Alexa for Shopping, which Amazon added to its own marketplace in May, replacing a disparate set of AI features that Amazon said drove nearly $12B in incremental sales last year.
Kate Spade is the first retailer to deploy the tool in production with its launch of the Kate Spade AI Gift Concierge, built on Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 model using Amazon Bedrock.
Is it just me? Or are AI tool announcements starting to feel like the opening production logos to movies?
“Kate Spade AI Gift Concierge, brought to you by Amazon Agentic Shopping Assistant, built on Anthropic Claude Haiku 4.5, via Amazon Bedrock, in partnership with AgentCore and OpenSearch, presented by AWS, in cooperation with Tapestry.” And then there's a roaring lion surrounded by a golden AI chat widget.
Anyway… I'm impressed with the product and would love to have Alexa for Shopping running on my own retail websites. Though it makes me question whether we're moving toward an online retail environment where independent D2C websites are either going to be powered by Amazon, Google, or Walmart AI products. Yes, there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of other AI search and chatbot solutions currently on the market for independent retailers, but most of them are just LLM wrappers, and none of them get you as close to Amazon's retail expertise or have been battle tested on Amazon.com.
