Amazon is taking another leap into artificial intelligence, this time with an upgrade designed to transform how third-party merchants manage their online operations.
At its annual Accelerate conference for sellers in Seattle on Wednesday, the company introduced an AI agent built into its Seller Assistant platform. Unlike earlier versions, which primarily responded to queries, the new tool comes with agentic capabilities—meaning it can now take action on a merchant’s behalf with their permission.
Amazon said the move is intended to free up merchants’ time so they can “spend more time focusing on product innovation and customer relationships,” while AI handles the more repetitive but critical operational tasks.
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The enhanced Seller Assistant can now coordinate inventory orders, plan for business growth, and implement fixes for account issues—functions that could help merchants avoid costly suspensions and delays. Over time, Amazon expects to add more of these automated abilities based on seller feedback.
The rollout builds on Amazon’s expanding suite of AI tools for sellers, who account for more than half of all goods sold on its marketplace. These include product listing generators and tools that can create marketing images and videos. Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide selling partner services, told CNBC that 1.3 million third-party sellers have already used its generative AI listing tools, which can automatically produce about 70% of a product listing.
“It really gives the seller, in some sense, a team of experts,” Mehta said. “An expert in listing and in pricing and promotions and supply chain, all the things that a small business normally has to either try and learn on their own, hire someone to be an expert, pay someone to be an expert, or sometimes just accept not being that good at, which is not ideal.”
Amazon said it is not currently planning to charge merchants for the new AI features. Instead, sellers continue to pay for the company’s in-house services like fulfillment and account management, which have become a cornerstone of Amazon’s business, generating $40.3 billion in revenue in the second quarter alone.
The move also underscores a shift in the broader AI industry. After early hype around image and text generators, companies are now pivoting toward agentic AI—tools capable of executing multi-step tasks with minimal supervision. Amazon itself previewed an experimental browser-based AI agent from its San Francisco lab earlier this year.
Seller Assistant is built on Amazon Bedrock, a platform that lets users access large language models not only from Amazon but also from AI startups like Anthropic and OpenAI.
The latest update represents a continuation of Amazon’s efforts that began last year with the launch of Project Amelia, the first iteration of its seller-focused AI assistant. That version provided basic troubleshooting and inventory advice. The new version goes further by actively managing parts of the seller’s business.
For Amazon, the rollout signals both a defensive and offensive play. On one hand, it strengthens its ties with the millions of small businesses that fuel its marketplace. On the other, it puts pressure on rivals such as Shopify, which has also integrated AI tools to help merchants streamline product listings and ad campaigns.
With AI tools quickly becoming table stakes in e-commerce, the battle is now over who can offer the most powerful—and most useful—AI assistants to sellers. Amazon, with its deep infrastructure, access to large-scale seller data, and cloud-powered AI backbone, appears determined to stay ahead.
How Amazon’s AI Push Stacks Up
Amazon’s latest AI rollout comes as part of a broader race among global e-commerce giants to embed AI directly into their seller ecosystems. Each company is developing AI agents for specific merchant tasks, reducing their dependence on external AI providers like OpenAI, Perplexity, and others.
Shopify has integrated generative AI through its Shopify Magic suite, which helps merchants automatically draft product descriptions, generate ad copy, and even predict customer behavior. Shopify’s approach leans heavily on streamlining marketing and customer engagement, but it lacks Amazon’s scale in fulfillment and logistics support.
Alibaba, through its sprawling Taobao and Tmall platforms, has rolled out its own AI-driven merchant tools that assist sellers in demand forecasting, inventory planning, and customer service. Leveraging its homegrown Tongyi Qianwen LLM, Alibaba is positioning its AI as deeply localized for Chinese markets, while also reducing reliance on U.S. AI models at a time of geopolitical tensions.
Walmart has taken a more measured approach, embedding AI features into Walmart Connect for advertising optimization and supply chain management. The retail giant recently announced experiments with AI chatbots that help merchants adjust pricing and promotions in real-time.
What unites these efforts is a recognition that AI is no longer just a consumer-facing tool—it is becoming the backbone of merchant operations.