E-commerce

Amazon adds chatbot for its sellers, boosting automation

Amazon.com announced on Thursday a new artificial intelligence application that it says will help its independent sellers with sales metrics, inventory maintenance and product advertising, among other things.

The move is part of a broader Big Tech effort to employ the technology for greater automation.

The software, dubbed Amelia, can provide instantaneous answers to broad questions such as how to prepare for the holidays and how a seller’s business is performing, including units sold and website traffic.

Later, the company says, the software will be able to help resolve problems of sellers such as delayed shipments without additional human intervention.

In a demonstration of the software for Reuters, Amazon showed how Amelia can quickly call up metrics for a seller, such as sales data. It also made suggestions for preparing for major sales holidays, including promotions and buying advertising on Amazon.com.

Amelia is meant to give sellers “their own personalized expert in selling on Amazon,” said Dharmesh Mehta, vice president of worldwide selling partner services at Amazon. “It needs to be a deep expert in all these kind of core parts of running your selling business.”

Amazon, which relies on third-parties to supply more than three out of every five units it sells, has had an at-times testy relationship with sellers, particularly over fees.

By automating some of the seller customer service, Amazon may be able to more inexpensively handle complaints and other difficulties that would otherwise require human intervention.

The Seattle retailer announced Amelia during its annual conference in its hometown where many of its roughly 450,000 US independent sellers converge for tips and tricks, and to learn about new products and services.

Amelia follows the announcement earlier this year of Rufus, a generative AI search engine Amazon added to its website to help customers find more products. Amazon has since started selling advertising within Rufus, suggesting it may let marketers pay in exchange for the software’s recommendation.

It has also rolled out a corporate chatbot and is working to improve its Alexa voice assistant by updating it with a more conversational AI.

Amazon boosted capital expenditure in this year’s second quarter to about $16.5 billion from $14 billion in the first quarter, driven in large part by AI investments.

Since the release in late 2022 of ChatGPT, Silicon Valley has seen an investing frenzy over generative AI which can create full sentence responses to prompts or create lifelike images or sounds.

But generative AI software can invent answers, known as hallucinations, when it lacks sufficient training data. Mehta said Amelia could hallucinate and such occasions would be addressed depending on the severity of the mistake.

He said Amazon had no plans to offer ads within Amelia. The service will not be made available in its current form to large brands such as Unilever, who also sell on Amazon, he said.

Amazon said Amelia will initially be available only to a small subset of sellers and only in English before nearly all US sellers gain access over the next month.

• Reporting by Greg Bensinger; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman, of Reuters.