Amazon is leaning hard into generative and agentic AI to reshape how more than 250 million Rufus 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 as an all‑in‑one AI shopping assistant
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%. Together, these tools help shoppers find lookalike items they see in real life or on social media without needing the right keywords.
Features that summarize, narrate, and size
To reduce information overload on product pages, Amazon is layering AI onto reviews and specs. Review highlights (“Customers say”) condense sentiment from reviews into short summaries that now receive hundreds of millions of impressions weekly, with customer engagement in the feature doubling year over year.
For shoppers who prefer audio, Hear the Highlights offers spoken summaries of product details and reviews; it has expanded from hundreds of products at launch to millions today and has been used by millions of customers who have streamed more than seven million minutes of content, with nearly half listening through entire episodes. Meanwhile, personalized size recommendations generate billions of suggested sizes each month, using fit preferences, product details, and review data to lower return risk in apparel and footwear.
Agentic AI services: Interests, Buy for Me and Help Me Decide
Beyond search, Amazon is testing more agentic AI flows that act on shopper intent over time. Interests lets customers create prompts in their own words—such as “latest pickleball gear” or “black metal geometric wall art”—and then automatically notifies them when matching items, restocks or deals appear; nearly 20% of customers who created an Interest added a recommended item to their cart.
Buy for Me extends agentic behavior beyond Amazon’s own catalog by purchasing select products directly from brand websites when they are not available in Amazon’s store. The number of products that can be purchased through Buy for Me has grown from around 65,000 at launch to over 500,000 today, with positive customer response to having both on‑ and off‑Amazon options surfaced in one experience.
On the product research side, Help Me Decide analyzes browsing activity, searches and past purchases to recommend a specific item when a shopper is stuck between similar choices. It appears when someone has viewed several related products without purchasing and offers a tailored “best fit” based on their behavior.
Alexa+ and conversational shopping
With Alexa+, Amazon is pushing deeper into conversational commerce in the home. The company reports that Alexa+ users are having “deeper, more helpful” shopping conversations, and when they explore items through Alexa+, it results in roughly three times more on‑device purchases compared to the classic Alexa experience.
This ties voice into the broader AI stack: shoppers can ask whether a price is good, re‑order past products, check if wishlist items are on sale, or get style suggestions based on their history, all via natural language.
Low‑price positioning with AI on top
Alongside these AI investments, Amazon cites a Profitero study stating that its prices are on average about 14% lower than 23 other online U.S. retailers, reinforcing its low‑price positioning even as discovery becomes more sophisticated. For Prime members, more than 300 million items are available with fast, free delivery across home, apparel, beauty, grocery, and essentials, making AI‑driven recommendations more likely to translate into quick fulfillment.
