Amazon is leaning hard into generative and agentic AI to reshape how more than 250 million shoppers search, discover and decide what to buy on its platform. From the Rufus AI assistant to visual search, audio summaries and off‑site purchasing, the company is using AI to cut through a catalog of hundreds of millions of products and make shopping feel more conversational and personalized.
Rufus is positioned as Amazon’s next‑gen AI assistant for shopping, able to answer product questions, compare options, track prices and even act on a shopper’s behalf. It can search by activity, event or purpose (for example, “find pants that look like this image”), auto‑add items to carts, set price alerts, auto‑buy when a product drops to a set price, and digitize handwritten grocery lists into cart items.
Adoption has been rapid: more than 250 million customers have used Rufus…
this year, with monthly users up about 140% year over year and interactions up about 210%. Customers who use Rufus during a shopping journey are over 60% more likely to convert, underscoring how embedded AI guidance is becoming in Amazon’s funnel.
AI‑powered search, discovery and visual tools Traditional search on Amazon has evolved from keyword matching to intent‑aware ranking that uses AI to better understand what shoppers actually want.
The company says it now runs “AI‑powered search and discovery” across more than 35 product categories, using signals like reviews, price, return rates, delivery speed and browsing history to surface relevant results.
Visual tools play a growing role: Amazon Lens lets users search by photo and has seen photo searches more than double since 2023, while the new Lens Live feature has increased engagement in Lens by 13%…
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