Amazon entered the consumer chatbot fray on Thursday, announcing a new personal AI shopping assistant as the company struggles to catch up with other tech giants.
Customers can ask questions about the tool, Rufus, directly in the search bar of the company’s mobile app, Amazon said in a blog post. The AI ​​will then provide answers in a conversational tone. Examples provided in the announcement included a comparison of different types of coffee maker, gift recommendations, and a follow-up question about the durability of running shoes.
Rufus will be available starting Thursday to a “small subset of customers,” according to the post, and will roll out to additional customers in the coming weeks. Amazon declined to provide more details on how many people will participate in the tool’s initial launch.
Amazon allows its employees to bring their dogs to work, and a dog named Rufus was one of the first to wander into its offices in the company’s early days.
Amazon is struggling to shake off the perception that it is lagging behind the wave of AI tools launched more than a year ago when start-up OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot. If customers find Rufus useful and popular, Amazon could shake up the product search business — and control the online shopping experience even more.
Rufus “allows customers to discover items in a very different way than they could on e-commerce sites,” Andy Jassy, ​​the company’s chief executive, said on a call with investors. “It’s seamlessly integrated into the Amazon experience that customers are used to and love to be able to take action,” he said.
Microsoft and Google last spring launched chatbots and AI tools for their search engines, often emphasizing shopping-related uses, and startups like Perplexity have sought to redesign the search experience with AI in mind.
In the fall, Amazon launched an enterprise chatbot, called Q, for customers of its cloud computing division, and the company said it was working to make its Alexa voice assistant more conversational
Even without genetic AI, Amazon’s search bar and the top results it produces are some of the most important placements in online retail. They have been the subject of antitrust investigations, and product ads in search results are a foundation for the company’s thriving advertising business.
Consumers are more than twice as likely to search Amazon first compared to other search engines when looking for a specific product to buy. But the e-commerce giant has long wanted to attract customers when they’re still brainstorming and researching their options, when they typically turn to other sources, from TikTok to Google. Rufus is an attempt to bring customers to Amazon before they know exactly what they want.
“You’ll still be able to search in the search bar if you’re very clear about what you want,” Brian Olsavsky, the company’s chief financial officer, said on a call with reporters Thursday. “Rufus is more there to help you explore, and maybe if you have more questions.”
“It’s becoming more of a conversation with Amazon,” he said.
The Rufus tool is “trained on Amazon’s extensive product catalog, customer reviews, community Q. and As, and information from around the web,” the company said.
Mr. Jassy said during the earnings call that customers could ask Rufus for recommendations on the best golf ball to use for better spin control or the best cold weather jackets “and get careful explanations of what matters and product recommendations.”
If Rufus takes off, Amazon could take ad sales away from Google and social networking sites, where companies try to influence what customers decide to buy.
Amazon itself is a prolific advertiser on Google and social media apps, trying to engage customers earlier in their shopping process. Google, for its part, has tried for years to encroach on Amazon’s turf as well, launching several shopping initiatives to attract independent sellers, with little success.
Separately on Thursday, Amazon reported strong fourth-quarter earnings, fueled in part by the holiday season.
Sales in the quarter reached $170 billion, up 17% from a year earlier. The company had a profit of $10.6 billion. The results beat analysts’ expectations and Amazon’s own forecasts.
The services the company provides to third-party sellers in its marketplace, including fulfillment and shipping, and the advertising it offers to brands and sellers experienced particularly strong quarters.
Investors are keeping a close eye on Amazon’s most profitable divisions – cloud computing and advertising. Advertising rose 27 percent to $14.7 billion in sales, and Amazon Web Services rose 13 percent to $24.2 billion, just in line with investor expectations.
Over the past year, the company has cut tens of thousands of jobs, ended profitable projects, halted some expansion plans and reorganized its logistics operations to be faster and more efficient. The company had its highest quarterly operating income ever and projected confidence that profitability will continue.
