Amazon Upgrades Seller Assistant By Adding Agentic Capabilities
Amazon
’s accelerating its agentic AI
strategy.
The company announced at its annual seller conference, Amazon Accelerate, that it has upgraded its Seller Assistant with agentic capabilities. The assistant tool was previously powered by generative AI and could answer sellers’ questions about their inventory, Amazon’s policies and more. That project, codenamed Project Amelia,
launched during Accelerate last year.
The latest update goes beyond mere question-and-answer discussion and instead sees the assistant able to “reason, plan and help take action with a seller’s permission.”
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The promise of agentic AI is that it can draw on information and data sources to act autonomously, rooting out mundane tasks for the user that would otherwise manually handle those same duties.
Mary Beth Westmoreland, vice president, worldwide selling partner experience at Amazon, said in a blog post announcing Seller Assistant’s changes that agentic AI has the power to significantly influence the way sellers handle their businesses.
“Our agentic AI capabilities are designed to work seamlessly throughout the entire selling experience, which means sellers can go from handling every task themselves to collaborating with an intelligent assistant that works proactively on their behalf around the clock, while always keeping sellers in control,” Westmoreland wrote in the blog.
The agentic functions behind Seller Assistant will be powered by Amazon Bedrock, which gives users the ability to access foundation models from Amazon itself and from other large AI players, like Anthropic, OpenAI and Perplexity AI.
Amazon said it currently plans to make the agentic capabilities of Seller Assistant freely available to sellers. Many of those sellers already shell out funds to Amazon to leverage the company’s fulfillment arm, Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA). The agentic upgrades have already launched in the U.S., and the company plans to roll them out to other regions in the months to follow.
Seller Assistant will soon be able to analyze inventory data to alert sellers to slow-moving SKUs, suggest courses of action related to projected demand and recommend discount rates in line with major sales events or holidays. The agent will use sellers’ own data, paired with a repository of Amazon’s own insights, to help third-party players determine the best future course for specific items in their catalog.
The tool can also analyze the type of products a seller’s customers have interest in, then recommend that the seller expand or change their product line to meet demand. Westmoreland said the agent can “proactively develop comprehensive growth plans for sellers to review and take action for sellers when they want it to.”
Seller Assistant’s expertise will extend beyond routine business functions, as well. Amazon said the tool will aid sellers in ensuring their compliance mechanisms are up to date for each market they sell in. That’s inclusive of safety considerations and certifications needed to sell in certain geographies. If Seller Assistant flags an inconsistency or compliance issue, it will alert the seller to the problem and recommend the necessary additions or changes to a listing.
Amazon has already launched a variety of other seller-facing tools, like Enhance My Listing, which leverages generative AI to provide content suggestions for sellers’ product pages, and its A+ Content offering, which helps to add supplementary imagery and text to a product page to entice consumers based on their interests. The newly announced agentic capabilities also include an upgrade to Amazon’s seller ad studio; Seller Assistant can recommend ad concepts to sellers, targeted for their audience or for specific shopping occasions, like Father’s Day.
Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, said at Accelerate that the synergy created by tools like these could help propel sellers forward. Jassy has long been bullish about the potential for AI to significantly impact the e-commerce industry and the workforce behind it .
“I think what we’re doing together is very unusual,” Jassy told sellers at the conference. “I think the transformation that we’re seeing with AI is going to make it even easier and more compelling for you all to be able to sell and for us to collectively be successful together, and I’m really appreciative that we’re on this adventure together. I still think it’s very early days.”
To that end, Westmoreland said that Amazon is far from finished iterating on the ways agentic AI can impact the seller experience. She noted that the enhancements Amazon announced Wednesday build on previous innovation from the company.
“This evolution will help sellers spend more time focusing on product innovation and customer relationships while Seller Assistant handles complex and time-consuming operational tasks, making selling in Amazon’s store more efficient, strategic, and successful. And Seller Assistant will get even more capable over time, as we learn more about what sellers want and how we can help them,” she wrote.
