Amazon has announced the launch of an artificial intelligence tool that is designed to help third-party sellers quickly fix problems related to their accounts and obtain inventory and sales data.
Last Thursday, September 19, the mentioned e-commerce giant, which is currently also one of the largest players in the global technology sector and the owner of the best American delivery service, rolled out a beta version of its new product called Amelia. Initially, this product will be available to select sellers in the United States. Over time, the e-commerce giant intends to offer Amelia to a wider consumer audience. The company announced that access to the new artificial intelligence-based product will be scaled up by the end of the current year.
Amazon characterizes Amelia as an all-in-one sales expert powered by AI. The e-commerce giant provides access to its new product through Seller Central, an internal dashboard for third-party merchants.
Amelia is the latest product using generative artificial intelligence that Amazon has introduced to the market over the past year. It is worth noting that in this case, the actions of the e-commerce giant are largely what can be described as decisions driven by the global context existing outside the corporate space of the company. Amazon is looking to capitalize on the so-called artificial intelligence boom. In this case, it means a large-scale process that began after the debut in 2022 of ChatGPT from OpenAI, which impressed users with its cognitive abilities. Currently, the artificial intelligence industry is on an active development trajectory. AI is actually the main technology at the present stage of what can be called the digital evolution of human civilization. At the same time, artificial intelligence has already demonstrated its specific practical abilities, which can simplify, reduce the cost, and make many workflows more accurate. It is highly likely that AI will become a new means of production in the foreseeable future, which will have a global impact on the state of affairs in the economic space. Artificial intelligence, among other things, can interact with consumers and solve routine tasks related to static data and organizational aspects of doing business. Amelia is actually an example of confirming this statement.
It is worth noting that Amazon’s digital product line also includes a virtual shopping assistant, which operates based on artificial intelligence and is called Rufus, a chatbot for business Q, and Bedrock, an AI service for cloud customers.
The media also reported that the e-commerce giant intends to equip its Alexa voice assistant with machine intelligence functions. This initiative is not the only one on the list of Amazon’s plans related to interaction with the artificial intelligence industry. The e-commerce giant last September invested $1.25 billion in Anthropic, a developer of generative machine intelligence that elaborated the Claude chatbot competing with ChatGPT. In March 2024, Amazon announced its intention to make additional financial injections into this company for $2.75 billion. It is worth noting that the investment in the developer of generative artificial intelligence is the largest venture deal of the e-commerce giant as of today.
This year, Amazon chief executive officer Andy Jassy told investors that the capabilities of generative AI are almost unprecedented and it is necessary to increase the volume of capital spending to use it. According to him, there have not been such opportunities in the technology sector for a long time, perhaps since the advent of the Internet. The corresponding statement was made during the company’s first-quarter earnings call in April.
It is worth noting that technology giants such as Google and Microsoft are also investing in the development of products based on artificial intelligence, seeking to increase their level of competitiveness in the intensive AI market. Currently, many experts predict that over the next ten years, revenue in the mentioned market will exceed the $1 trillion mark. Those companies that will be able to offer effective and affordable products based on artificial intelligence will receive the most significant shares in the specified revenue.
The integration of machine intelligence into the Amazon e-commerce platform is also currently scaling up. Nowadays, the company displays AI-generated summaries of product reviews and it’s launched AI features for third-party sellers that help them write listings and generate photos for advertising.
Also on Thursday, the e-commerce giant announced the launch of tools that will allow sellers to generate video ads using artificial intelligence. Moreover, these tools can be applied to write product listings in bulk based on the entire catalog.
Amazon also announced the beginning of the practice of using generative artificial intelligence to show personalized product recommendations and listings based on a user’s shopping history. For example, the company will use the term gluten-free in the description of the cereal box if the buyer constantly focuses on the appropriate parameter when choosing goods.
The e-commerce giant made the relevant statements at its annual conference for sellers in Seattle. It is worth noting that third-party sellers are a kind of most important heartbeat component in the platform that provides Amazon’s dominance in the e-commerce area. Since about 2017, they have accounted for at least half of all products sold on the Amazon website. In the second quarter of the current year, the corresponding figure reached 61%.
Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide selling partner services, said during a conversation with media representatives that nowadays there is an increase in the number of sellers who use the company’s artificial intelligence-based services. In this context, he noted that more than 400,000 third-party sellers have already applied the listing tool powered by machine intelligence. According to him, in June the corresponding figure was 200,000 users.
Amazon expects Amelia to become a tool for solving the most important problem of third-party sellers, which is account troubleshooting. The company predicts that generative artificial intelligence will be able to successfully cope with the corresponding task. Currently, there are numerous teams in the Amazon structure, whose representatives help sellers eliminate failures that provoke the suspension of accounts, solve problems related to inventories, and build business on the website.
It is worth noting that merchants have long been complaining about difficulties with quickly completing the mentioned tasks. They also negatively assess the quality of service when contacting a specialist in cases where unforeseen problems are observed in the operation of accounts.
The e-commerce giant said that Amelia may offer the seller an investigation into account failures. The company also noted that over time, this digital product based on artificial intelligence will be able to solve relevant problems on behalf of the seller. Dharmesh Mehta stated that instead of filling out a missing inventory form, users will be able to ask Amelia to file an appropriate claim on their behalf. Also, a digital tool can solve this problem automatically.
Dharmesh Mehta stated that over time there will be places where Amelia will cope with the tasks coming from users who, as part of the appropriate practice, will not have to communicate with the support service. He underlined that as part of this solution, there would be no need to send an email and then wait for a response.
The e-commerce giant stated that Amelia uses Bedrock. The mentioned software tool provides consumers with access to large language models from Amazon and other companies, including, for example, Anthropic and Stability AI.
Dharmesh Mehta stated that Amelia is trained based on open data from the Internet environment and information from the resources of sellers cooperating with the e-commerce giant, FAQs, and other public-facing websites. Dharmesh Mehta noted that this product is not trained on seller-specific data, which is closely guarded.
The e-commerce giant also stated that Amelia uses retrieval-augmented generation or RAG. In this case, it means the framework of the artificial intelligence industry, which combines generative AI with long-established methods of information retrieval. The mentioned functional environment provides users with the ability to pull certain data about sellers from Amazon’s internal systems. It is worth noting separately that the relevant information is not saved and is not added to data arrays designed to train artificial intelligence models.
Mary Beth Westmoreland, VP of Amazon’s Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, said the company is committed to providing its sales partners with the most effective tools and capabilities that make it easier for them to start and grow a successful business. She also noted that the e-commerce giant, using the transformational power of generative artificial intelligence, is creating and deploying technologies that improve how sellers can manage and grow their businesses.
