Amazon’s new AI agent will shop third-party sites for you

Amazon is beginning to check a brand new AI purchasing agent, a characteristic it calls “Purchase for Me,” with a subset customers, the corporate introduced in a weblog put up Thursday.

If Amazon doesn’t promote one thing that customers are trying to find, the Purchase for Me characteristic will show merchandise to customers that different web sites are promoting. Then, customers can choose and request to buy one in every of these merchandise with out ever leaving the Amazon Procuring app.

Amazon is the newest firm to unveil an AI purchasing agent, becoming a member of corporations corresponding to OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity, which have all showcased comparable brokers that may go to web sites and assist customers make purchases. Amazon is already most individuals’s go-to platform for something they’d wish to buy on the web, however Purchase for Me might permit Amazon to seize much more e-commerce enterprise than it does as we speak.

Behind the scenes, Amazon’s AI purchasing agent will go to an exterior web site, choose a product {that a} consumer requested, and fill out the consumer’s identify, delivery deal with, and fee particulars to be able to buy it, in line with Amazon.

Amazon says the brand new agentic purchasing characteristic is powered by its Amazon Nova AI fashions, along with Anthropic’s Claude. A kind of fashions might be Nova Act, an AI agent Amazon unveiled earlier this week that may use web sites autonomously.

Amazon mentioned within the aforementioned weblog put up that Purchase for Me makes use of encryption to “securely” insert your billing data on third-party websites, such that Amazon can’t see what you’re ordering from outdoors its platform. It is a distinctive method in comparison with OpenAI and Google’s brokers, which require people to fill out bank card data themselves, in addition to Perplexity’s AI agent, which has a pay as you go debit card to make purchases.

Handing your bank card data over to AI, which is susceptible to hallucinations and errors, might give some customers severe pause. In Trendster’s expertise, AI purchasing brokers typically take a very long time to course of requests, and sometimes get caught someplace alongside the road.

Amazon is principally asking customers to belief that its agent received’t unintentionally buy 1,000 pairs of socks as an alternative of 10, for instance. It’s additionally asking that they settle for much less management over the purchasing expertise. If a buyer must return or trade an order, Purchase for Me will direct them to the digital storefront from which the AI agent made the acquisition.

We’ll quickly see how many individuals are keen to make the leap.