Overview
- AWS announced the Agentic Shopping Assistant on Wednesday, May 27, packaging the architecture, starter code and operational learnings from Alexa for Shopping into a product retailers can use.
- Amazon says a retailer can launch a branded, catalog-aware assistant in roughly 60 days using the package, shortening what would otherwise take months of custom work.
- Tapestry’s Kate Spade is an early customer and used the service to build a gifting concierge that Amazon says ran on Anthropic’s Haiku 4.5 through Amazon Bedrock after about 2.5 months of testing.
- AWS emphasizes that retailers keep control of customer data, product catalogs and business rules, a pitch meant to ease wariness about relying on a cloud provider that also competes in retail.
- The move extends Amazon’s long-standing pattern of productizing internal tech and raises stakes in a wider race with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and others to shape how AI mediates online shopping and checkout.