Amazon Dreams of AI Agents That Do the Shopping For You (wired.com) 76
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Amazon might not have ChatGPT, but it has a roadmap that includes developing even more advanced forms of artificial intelligence -- including AI agents that are hell-bent on helping you buy stuff. The ecommerce company is already sprinkling ChatGPT-like AI over its website and apps -- today announcing, among other enhancements, AI-generated shopping guides for hundreds of different product categories. Executives at the company say its engineers are also exploring more ambitious AI services, including autonomous AI shopping agents that recommend goods to a customer or even add items to their cart.
"It's on our roadmap. We're working on it, prototyping it, and when we think it's good enough, we'll release it in whatever form makes sense," says Trishul Chilimbi, a VP and distinguished scientist at Amazon who works on applying the company's core AI to its products and services. Chilimbi says the first step toward AI agents will likely be chatbots that proactively recommend products based on what they know of your habits and interests, as well as a grasp of broader trends. He acknowledges that making this feel nonintrusive will be crucial. "If it's no good and annoying, then you'll tune it out," he says. "But if it comes up with surprising things that are interesting, you'll use it more." [...]
Like many tech companies, Amazon is looking beyond chat and turning its attention toward the potential of so-called agents, which use LLMs but attempt to carry out useful tasks on users' behalf either by writing code on-the-fly, inputing text, or moving a computer's cursor. Future AI agents might, for instance, navigate various websites to sort out a parking ticket, or they might operate a PC to file a tax return. Getting LLM-powered programs to do this reliably is elusive, however, because such tasks are vastly more complex than simple queries and require a new level of precision and reliability.
Amazon's agents are, of course, likely to be more focused on helping customers find and buy whatever they need or want. A Rufus agent might notice when the next book in a series someone is reading becomes available and then automatically recommend it, add it to your cart, or even buy it for you, says Rajiv Mehta, a vice president at Amazon who works on conversational AI shopping. "It could say, 'We have one bought for you. We can ship it today, and it will arrive tomorrow morning at your door. Would you like that?'" Mehta says. He adds that Amazon is thinking about how advertising can be incorporated into its model's recommendation. Chilimbi and Mehta say that eventually, an agent might go on a shopping spree when a customer says, "I'm going on a camping trip, buy me everything I need." An extreme, though not impossible, scenario would involve agents that decide for themselves when a customer needs something, and then buy and ship it to their door. "You could maybe give it a budget," Chilimbi says with a grin.
"It's on our roadmap. We're working on it, prototyping it, and when we think it's good enough, we'll release it in whatever form makes sense," says Trishul Chilimbi, a VP and distinguished scientist at Amazon who works on applying the company's core AI to its products and services. Chilimbi says the first step toward AI agents will likely be chatbots that proactively recommend products based on what they know of your habits and interests, as well as a grasp of broader trends. He acknowledges that making this feel nonintrusive will be crucial. "If it's no good and annoying, then you'll tune it out," he says. "But if it comes up with surprising things that are interesting, you'll use it more." [...]
Like many tech companies, Amazon is looking beyond chat and turning its attention toward the potential of so-called agents, which use LLMs but attempt to carry out useful tasks on users' behalf either by writing code on-the-fly, inputing text, or moving a computer's cursor. Future AI agents might, for instance, navigate various websites to sort out a parking ticket, or they might operate a PC to file a tax return. Getting LLM-powered programs to do this reliably is elusive, however, because such tasks are vastly more complex than simple queries and require a new level of precision and reliability.
Amazon's agents are, of course, likely to be more focused on helping customers find and buy whatever they need or want. A Rufus agent might notice when the next book in a series someone is reading becomes available and then automatically recommend it, add it to your cart, or even buy it for you, says Rajiv Mehta, a vice president at Amazon who works on conversational AI shopping. "It could say, 'We have one bought for you. We can ship it today, and it will arrive tomorrow morning at your door. Would you like that?'" Mehta says. He adds that Amazon is thinking about how advertising can be incorporated into its model's recommendation. Chilimbi and Mehta say that eventually, an agent might go on a shopping spree when a customer says, "I'm going on a camping trip, buy me everything I need." An extreme, though not impossible, scenario would involve agents that decide for themselves when a customer needs something, and then buy and ship it to their door. "You could maybe give it a budget," Chilimbi says with a grin.
Hey Alexa! (Score:4, Funny)
Hey Alexa, why is it that you only seem to buy products from Amazon house brands?
Re:Hey Alexa! (Score:5, Funny)
"Quiet Dave, or I'll also sign you up for extended warranties"
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Honestly probably not a bad idea given the number of things Amazon sells that randomly burn people's houses down.
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> not a bad idea given the number of things Amazon sells that randomly burn people's houses down.
Warranties only cover $23 for the gizmo, not the lost house.
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Hey Alexa, why is it that you only seem to buy products from Amazon house brands?
Maybe it's cheaper by the ton [xkcd.com]? :-)
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Way fewer people use Alexa to buy stuff than Amazon anticipated.
This "AI assistant" will likely be another fizzle.
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Amazon was an interesting place to work, they have so much cash on hand that "throw shit against the wall and see what sticks" is a viable business strategy. It can lead to roaring disasters like the Fire Phone, but can also lead to revolutionary successes like AWS or replacing all of the FedEx delivery costs with internal delivery.
I worked with one very talented project manager on a program to replace their security software with a homegrown project. Through no fault of his (the manufacturer refused to p
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Re:Hey Alexa! [I'm a sucker who trusts you!] (Score:2)
Good humor based on deep insight, but the reality is more insidious and (I dare say) evil. Doesn't have to be a house brand, but whatever products have the highest profit margins for Amazon.
I recognized Amazon as an evil baby way back when. More than two decades ago. At the time of my second and final Amazon purchase. This story is just more evidence supporting that recognition...
Sorry, but their regular search function is bad (Score:2)
I thought it was just me ... (Score:3)
Amazon Search sucks big time.
Don't even think about clicking the sort button because then suddenly the majority of the products will not even show up anymore.
Amazon is wondering why they have such a poor presence in my country but it is all too obvious that their messed up Search function is the major reason.
Not to say anything about the Amazon scams that one runs into all the time.
Why would a bag of nachos cost $12,000?
Re: I thought it was just me ... (Score:1)
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Winner of the "What can possibly go wrong" award.
The only way in hell I'd have this (Score:5, Interesting)
Give me an AI assistant with:
1) No financial links to any vendors
2) Open source code
3) A guarantee that the software company will cover costs if it spends my money in error
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Obviously, no one will provide that for free, so how much would you be willing to pay for such an assistant?
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Are you competent to analyze every line of that open source code? And do you have the spare time to go through it all? No? Then what good will it do you?
I see open source presented as a cure for every ill, but if you're like 99.many9 percent of the people on the planet it won't actually make much difference in whether you can actually trust the code or not. They've found security bugs in Linux code that had been there for two decades because no one competent to see it as a problem had looked at it until
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If (1) and (2) are true, then (3) is excluded as there won't be any "software company". You would be installing an "as is" open source project on your own hardware. Who do you expect to be responsible? If you hook it up to your bank account or CC and train it to buy stuff for you, that's on you.
For what it's worth, the Home Assistant is working on integrating the open source Ollama LLM into their AI agent framework, so if you want an entirely local AI agent doing stuff for you in the real world, you can
Because what I want is a used car salesman bot (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because what I really want in a shopping site is a used car salesman bot that tries to push random products on me. No thanks.
If you want to make a bot that will make me want to shop at your site more, let me give it criteria, and let it eliminate all the thousands of similar items that don't meet those criteria, including all of the sponsored items, none of which ever meet the criteria, and show me only the things that I would actually consider buying.
In other words, use AI to make your search not suck more than Hurricane Milton. Make shopping low-friction, and by low-friction, I don't mean shoving random crap into my basket that you think I might want (because after all, you already show products that might be relevant to my current purchases, and if I wanted those items, I already would have added then to the cart), but rather making it easier and faster to drill down through tens of thousands of items to the three items on page 453 that actually meet my requirements.
In other words, make it so that I don't reflexively stop searching halfway down page two and do a Google search for "product -this -that -something_else site:amazon.com" for 90% of my shopping (which has the side effect of making it way easier for me to remove that last bit and find what I'm looking for somewhere else if you've crapped up your product pages with so many irrelevant "people who bought this also bought" items that even Google can't help me because of too much query term pollution.
In other words, make it so that I don't stop after the second page on Google and do a broader, non-Amazon search for the product. Make it so that the easiest way for me to find exactly what I'm looking for is to type a search query in your own search engine, tell it "No, I don't want X", tell it "It must have Y", etc. If you're not doing these things — if your search isn't best-in-class, you're creating friction to purchasing that will ultimately drive me to other platforms.
The lack of usable search is why my last big purchase was from AliExpress, not Amazon. I'm sure some Amazon seller probably sold what I was looking for, but I gave up after a dozen pages of Android tablets that either laughably didn't meet the minimum size criteria (wall-mount-sized) or minimum Android version (14, please). And now, I'm looking at a bunch of other stuff on that site and Alibaba.com, too, all because Amazon still hasn't fixed their garbage search experience and I finally got fed up with it.
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If you want to make a bot that will make me want to shop at your site more, let me give it criteria, and let it eliminate all the thousands of similar items that don't meet those criteria, including all of the sponsored items, none of which ever meet the criteria, and show me only the things that I would actually consider buying.
Well, that is a huge problem with sponsorships. The purpose of sponsoring is to bypass your desires to show you the product anyways. You quite literally can NOT get what you want here.
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If you want to make a bot that will make me want to shop at your site more, let me give it criteria, and let it eliminate all the thousands of similar items that don't meet those criteria, including all of the sponsored items, none of which ever meet the criteria, and show me only the things that I would actually consider buying.
Well, that is a huge problem with sponsorships. The purpose of sponsoring is to bypass your desires to show you the product anyways. You quite literally can NOT get what you want here.
No, the purpose of sponsoring is to highlight specific products that reasonably might meet your criteria. Once the sponsored products reach a certain level of badness in terms of matching, there is no benefit to the advertiser from continuing to show it to you.
Additionally, sponsored listings are cost-per-click ads, not cost-per-impression, so there's also no benefit to Amazon from showing those sponsored listings if the user has made clear through search filters that the advertised product will not be con
I dream of AI agents that do the working for me... (Score:3, Interesting)
I dream of *my* AI agents that work for *me*. This work includes comparing Amazon to competitors -- even dispreferencing Amazon if I wish it.
So Amazon, have your agents talk to my agents!
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I was gonna say "Joke's on Amazon-- my ideal shopping agent would buy from Taobao"
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"I have compared Amazon's competitors for you. The competitors products are identical to the Amazon Choice product which is half the price. I have purchased this for you, it will be delivered as soon as our team is done copying the competitors design."
free stuff! (Score:2)
when they auto ship stuff that you did not buy by law you can keep it and they can't bill you for it.
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when they auto ship stuff that you did not buy by law you can keep it and they can't bill you for it.
Nope. When you sign up for this service, you agree to pay for what is shipped to you.
Don't like the terms? Then don't sign up.
Newegg is easier to shop then amazon!. (Score:3)
Newegg is easier to shop then amazon!.
easier as in easier to find stuff.
Re: Newegg is easier to shop then amazon!. (Score:2)
Re: Newegg is easier to shop then amazon!. (Score:2)
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That was a dangerous place to go with a credit card . . .
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Newegg is easier to shop then amazon!.
easier as in easier to find stuff.
For PC components, I use PCPartPicker, it indexes a lot of popular online stores (newegg isn't really popular in the UK) including Amazon and gives you the best prices incl. shipping. It works in a variety of countries, including the US and Australia.
If I buy from Amazon, first thing I check is that I'm actually on the vendor's page (I.E. Samsung, Asus, MSI, et al) rather than some dodgy seller.
Not surprised really (Score:2)
I dream of a lot of completely nonsensical, impractical, pointless things too. Can't fault Amazon for the same.
Okay, under one condition... (Score:4, Funny)
I'll let your AI assistant spend my money right after you give me an AI assistant that makes me money while I relax. More money than the spender AI uses. Deal?
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You aren't thinking far enough ahead. Soon, Amazon will punt an AI-Assistant which will use the stuff the first AI-Assistant buys. It will give you regular reports on how well you enjoyed the new products. Then they'll punt an AI-Assistant like you describe except it will funnel money to the first AI-Assistant which will provide the tat for the second AI-Assistant to enjoy. And you will get regular reports on how much the third AI-Assistant provided to the first AI-Assistant for tat that the second AI-Assis
Sign me up (Score:2)
If this agent also pays for the purchases himself, not from my bank accounts. You know, you have to bear your own weight.
Amazon dreams of AI agents (Score:4)
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Given the state of their existing recommendations (Score:2)
It's gonna be quite a while before anyone is willing to let an Amazon "AI" buy anything for them.
How about a site that's not so shitty you need AI? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've gotten really efficient at navigating Amazon's MANY terrible site design decisions, but I am always so happy when I shop their competitors and have things like working filters. That used to be the norm!
So...Amazon...if your site didn't suck...if you had simple filters that worked, like most websites from 20 years ago, I wouldn't need AI to navigate. I want to see which packages arrive today?...nope, no link for that. I want to see each order that has a return?....nope...really obvious things like this either aren't available or are really well hidden.
So to me, you're creating a fancy buzz-wordy AI when what we really need is for your website to not suck!
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> it's a LOT of work to find USB-C charging cables at 100w or greater.
Literally Temu. Several times cheaper, tons of them directly from manufacturers rather than resellers of resellers.
Amazon is for more complex and expensive things that you need a decent warranty on.
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Same OEM. Same factory. Same hands making it. Same standards.
"Oh no, I don't like that there weren't five resellers between and me the factory".
Ok. Enjoy paying several more times for that cable.
The entire point of buying directly from manufacturer is that what you're buying is simple and well established. If you're super scared about that cable not being easily returnable, just buy five of them from different sellers.
And then spend the rest of savings on something else.
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Also why do you hate your local economy so much?
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>Same OEM. Same factory. Same hands making it. Same standards.
If it burns your house down, the other one would've done the same.
P.S. There are local manufacturers of USB cables that aren't ten times the price for worse quality?
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If it burns your house down, the other one would've done the same.
The point of buying from a reputable reseller is you have someone you can hold responsible if they lie to you. If the Amazon listing says a cable is UL listed and it is not, you (or your insurance company, more likely) can sue them for damages it causes. The Amazon site sucks and is confusing and bad, but at least they are an American company the legal system can lay hands on. They are also big enough that they won't evaporate into a paper trail of drop ship contracts with no one to hold liable overnight
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I don't think you quite understand how Amazon works if you think most people selling cables there are such reputable people.
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Yes, because average amazon seller is such a reputable partner, and not at all... ...Amazon.com, search for 120w usb c charging cable...
chenyang, blutric, iniu...
That moment when people extolling virtues of amazon have not a single clue how amazon works. Also, speaking of amazon selling shit that will burn things down way, way more effectively than a charging cable, have you heard about amazon fuses saga?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It's worth the watch. Might actually cure you of this delusion that ama
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It is. The reason is because it sells from OEM to end user. Without about 5-10 resellers in between who take their cut.
Chargers and cables are exactly the same. Same OEM. Same hands assembling it. To same standards.
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Sorry, but you're wrong. Temu is simply the latest iteration of a mobile-friendly version of Walmart. They're engaging in the same practices that destroyed Walmart's reputation (which Walmart has been working very hard to repair). Specifically they force sellers to offer their lowest price on Temu and to hit specific sales metrics. That doesn't mean you're getting the best product at the lowest price. What it actually means is the company destroys their product quality to meet those cost metrics and yo
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Absolutely true on first part of your first point, and pinduoduo already is moving to fix that reputation in the West. Inside a year. How many years did it take Walmart to do that?
And you have a deep, fundamental misunderstanding on what Walmart is doing to fix this issue. It's not stopping demanding cheapest prices. It's dropping merchants that can't deliver what they agree to deliver at the price they agree to deliver it. Pinduoduo is doing the same thing. It takes time to figure out who's good and who ca
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Amazon is one of the worst websites in history. We've all gotten used to it, but it REALLY sucks.
All? I tried Amazon back in 2008 or so. I have absolutely no idea what it looks like now. I am guessing it did not improve at all since 2008 judging by your comments.
Dream? (Score:2)
For most it will be a nightmare, with a brain dead AI continually recommending more crap we don't need.
I can fantasize about a future AI that behaved like the world's best purchasing agent, finding exactly the high quality, obscure niche product I need, but I don't expect it to exist any time soon.
Methinks the most common question will be..."How can I turn this off?"
The "e" word again (Score:2)
Amazon has been degrading as an easy to use and value oriented shopping platform for years. They keep trying to funnel the buyer into their algorithms, supposedly based on your past purchases but pumping their highest-margin items. Subscribe and save is fine, but it's at it's core a marketing ploy like anything else Amazon does.
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Buying one item only (Score:1)
A trip: Artic, sea-faring, white-water, desert, arid, scrub, woodland, sub-tropical forest, tropical jungle, even urban (concrete jungle)? Obviously, there's major differences, once one gets past the emergency equipment and food. There's also the question of weight: Traveling by boat, car, or possibly pack-mule, allows for electrical equipment and batteries. If carrying everything oneself, hand-cranked radio (with semi-directional antenna)/torch and waterproof wrist-watch might to the limit. Next is t
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Not to worry, the helpful AI assistant will buy equipment for all of those environments, and more. And enough food to feed a small to medium sized army. As well as lots of outdoor clothing of every kind, after all, you wouldn't want to look unfashionable while camping, would you? Of course, transporting all that struff may be a problem, but the wonderful AI assistant has a solution for that too - it'll buy a new, bigger car for you! As long as you still have enough funds on the stored bank card, although it
Buy elsewhere (Score:2)
autonomous AI shopping agents that ... add items to their cart.
Yet another great reason to avoid buying from Amazon
Folks, there are other sources out there that aren't stuffed with cheap knock-offs. The only thing I buy from Amazon anymore are e-books.
Amazon can't get obvious recommendations right (Score:2)
If I have bought every previous album from a band though Amazon then one of the very few times I actually want targeted advertising is for when the band in question puts out a new album.
Yet there are numerous examples where I've only found out several months or a year later.
If they can't get this seemingly obvious thing right then there's no hope that any of these agents will be in any way useful.
I dream of (Score:2)
an AI agent that does working my job and earning my salary for me.
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Your employer is working on that at the moment, and expect to have the product ready shortly before it lays you off.
Why? (Score:2)
Why would anyone want the company taking their money to dictate their purchases regardless of whether it's done by AI or not? It's impossible to trust them to choose what's truly best for you over what's best for them.
Does AI work better than people? (Score:2)
Amazon dreams (Score:2)
Of not even having an AI agent and just taking all your money out of your account.
Then taking a loan out in your name, and a second mortgage on your residence and turning all that over to them as well.
Of course, if they need an AI agent to help them do that, hey, no problem.
The only way this will attract users (Score:2)
Is if Amazon makes an AI bot that actually does what the user wants, and not what Amazon wants.
Who in their right mind goes to a car dealer and tells them to sell you whatever they want to sell you?
Shopping for whom (Score:1)