Amazon packages are ready for delivery at Amazon robotic fulfillment centers.
Nathan Stick | Getty Images
Amazon is launching an artificial intelligence tool designed to help third-party sellers quickly resolve account issues and obtain sales and inventory data.
The company said Thursday it will launch a product called Amelia to be tested with select U.S. sellers before rolling it out more broadly later this year. Amazon describes it as an “all-in-one, generative AI-based sales expert” and accesses it through Seller Central, an internal dashboard for third-party merchants.
Amelia is the latest generative artificial intelligence tool Amazon brought to market last year, aiming to capitalize on the hype generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company has launched an artificial intelligence shopping assistant called Rufus, a chatbot called Q, and Bedrock, a generative artificial intelligence service for cloud customers.
Amazon also plans to upgrade its Alexa voice assistant with generative AI capabilities, and the company has invested billions in OpenAI competitor Anthropic, its largest venture capital deal to date, according to previous reports by CNBC.
Chief Executive Andy Jassy told investors earlier this year that the “generative AI opportunity” is almost unprecedented and will require increased capital expenditures to take advantage of it.
“I don’t know if any of us have seen this possibility in technology in a long time, certainly since cloud computing,” Jassy said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call in April. Maybe since the internet.
Andy Jassy takes the stage at the 2022 New York Times DealBook on November 30, 2022 in New York City.
Thos Robinson | Getty Images
Google and Microsoft Competitor products are launched to ensure their relevance in a market expected to grow Up to $1 trillion Income over ten years.
Artificial intelligence is also becoming more prevalent on Amazon’s e-commerce platform. The company now displays AI-generated product review summaries and has launched an AI feature for third-party sellers that can help them write listings and Generate advertising photos.
Amazon also said on Thursday it was rolling out tools that will allow sellers to create AI-generated video ads and use AI to bulk write product listings based on their entire catalog. The company said it is starting to use generative artificial intelligence to display personalized product recommendations and lists based on a user’s shopping history. For example, Amazon would display the word “gluten-free” in the description of a box of cereal if shoppers typically search for products with that phrase.
Amazon made the announcement at its annual seller conference in Seattle. Third-party sellers are at the heart of Amazon’s dominant e-commerce business. Since about 2017, they have accounted for at least half of all items sold on the site. In the second quarter of this year, that number soared to 61%.
Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of global sales partner services, said in an interview with CNBC that more and more merchants are using its artificial intelligence services. He said more than 400,000 of Amazon’s millions of third-party sellers have used its artificial intelligence listing tools, up from 200,000 in June.
Amazon hopes to use Amelia to generate artificial intelligence to help solve a key problem for third-party merchants – account troubleshooting. The company has a large team that helps sellers resolve account suspensions, deal with inventory issues, and build a presence on the site. Merchants have long complained that when unforeseen problems arise with their accounts, it’s difficult to quickly resolve the issue or contact human resources.
The company said Amelia can help investigate account issues and will be able to “resolve issues on behalf of sellers” in the future. Mehta described how instead of filling out a missing inventory form, sellers could ask Amelia to file a claim for them, or the tool could automatically resolve the issue.
“In some places, hey, maybe Amelia can do this instead of chatting with seller support or being on the phone with someone and do it faster,” Mehta said. “I don’t need to email someone and wait for a response.”
Amazon said Amelia uses Bedrock, a software tool that allows users to access large language models from Amazon and other companies such as Anthropic and Stability AI. Mehta said Amelia was trained on public data from the Internet and information obtained from Amazon. Seller resourcesFAQs and other public-facing websites.
Mehta said the model was not trained on seller-specific profiles, which are closely guarded.
Amazon says the tool uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), a popular industry AI framework that combines generative AI with time-honored information retrieval methods. It allows certain seller-specific information to be extracted from Amazon’s internal systems without having to store it or include it in model training materials.