Amazon $AMZN announced Wednesday that it is sharing the technology behind its Alexa for Shopping AI assistant to outside retailers through a new AWS product called the AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant.
AWS's Agentic Shopping Assistant was built using the same foundations and learnings behind Alexa for Shopping, giving retailers access to proven, at-scale AI technology tailored to their specific catalog and customer base.
Retailers using the service gain access to the underlying code, design principles, and operational knowledge developed through Alexa for Shopping, enabling them to build conversational commerce tools calibrated to their own inventory, identity, and customers, the company said. Amazon said retailers can launch in roughly 60 days with support from the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, rather than the years such development would take from scratch.
Kate Spade, owned by Tapestry, is the first retailer to deploy the tool in production. On April 13, Tapestry launched the Kate Spade AI Gift Concierge, built on Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 model using Amazon Bedrock, the company said. The assistant engages shoppers in conversation about occasion, recipient, and style to generate product recommendations, targeting the gift-buying experience. Additional retailers are currently in testing, Amazon said.
"We are excited about the possibilities agentic commerce can bring to our customers," Yang Lu, chief information and digital officer at Tapestry, said in a statement. "AWS brought the recipe, but together we built the customization our consumers needed."
The commercialization strategy echoes a broader playbook Amazon has run repeatedly, according to CNBC — building something for its own operations and eventually turning it into a product line, a trajectory that previously played out with cloud computing, cashier-less store technology, and logistics services.
Amazon said conversational shopping sessions convert at 3.5 times the rate of traditional keyword search, and framed the product as a way for retailers to maintain direct customer relationships rather than ceding the shopping experience to third-party AI platforms. Amazon also argued that retailers hold a competitive informational edge — accumulated expertise about their own merchandise and shoppers — that broad-purpose AI systems are inherently unable to replicate.
Quartz reported earlier this month that Amazon rebranded its Rufus chatbot as Alexa for Shopping, embedding the assistant directly into the main Amazon search bar and adding features including side-by-side product comparisons, AI-generated overviews, up to a year of price history, and a Buy for Me feature that can complete purchases on third-party retailer websites. Alexa for Shopping drew on 300 million customers who used Rufus in 2025 and drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales for Amazon last year, the company said.
Across retail, the competitive picture is fragmented, according to CNBC, with major players such as Walmart $WMT, Target $TGT, and Gap $GPS simultaneously developing proprietary AI capabilities and striking deals with outside platforms including OpenAI and Google $GOOGL.