Amazon Ups Agentic AI Ante with Expanded Seller Assistant Feature

Amazon's latest move targets third-party sellers with its expanded Seller Assistant feature. The new workflows allow sellers to create recurring automations that run even when they are not logged into Seller Central, monitoring inventory thresholds, competitive pricing, account health and product ratings, with the option to either generate recommendations or take approved actions.

The assistant now retains memory of a seller's pricing patterns, inventory cycles and growth goals. It also connects to tools sellers already use, starting with Amazon Quick and Anthropic's Claude. However, the service is free and optional, so any financial benefit will be indirect, coming through seller productivity, selection and advertising engagement.

Agentic features are already gaining traction elsewhere in the business. Alexa for Shopping, which combines Rufus and Alexa+, nearly doubled active users in the second quarter, with interactions up more than 5x year over year, and U.S. customers using it spend over 40% more per order. Ads Agent, expanded to 11 new countries this year, delivers 8% lower cost-per-impression and 6% lower cost-per-acquisition, supporting advertising growth of 26%. In Amazon Web Services (“AWS”), Bedrock AgentCore added Payments and Web Search capabilities, while Kiro usage tripled sequentially.

Amazon's fundamentals support its strategy. Second-quarter net sales rose 20% to $200.6 billion, and operating income climbed 43% to $27.5 billion. AWS sales grew 37% to $42.2 billion, and its AI business exceeded a $25 billion annual run rate.