Amazon Launches AI Assistant To Help Third-Party Sellers

Amazon has launched an AI-powered chatbot service to assist online merchants manage their businesses.

Codenamed Project Amelia, it builds on generative AI technology to answer a range of questions, from how to prepare for the holiday shopping season to suggesting the wording of product listings.

Amelia is available in beta for a subset of merchants and will be rolled out to all US sellers over the next month.

Later this year, Amazon will start introducing Amelia to other countries and making it available in languages besides English.

The assistant is built atop Bedrock, a software platform designed to make it easier to access other companies’ large language models, as well as Amazon’s own.

There are three main areas where Amelia will assist sellers: knowledge-based questions; status updates and metrics; and actions and issue resolution.

In the area of knowledge-based questions, sellers can ask specific questions and receive relevant, summarised information learned from highly accurate and reliable sources on Seller Central. They can pose questions such as “What are the top things I need to do to prepare for the holiday season?” and Project Amelia will quickly produce personalised information and best practices.

In the status updates and metrics domain, Project Amelia help sellers to quickly retrieve their sales data and customer traffic information. When they pose a question such as “How is my business doing?”, Project Amelia will provide a summary of recent sales, units sold, and website traffic, and compare this data to the prior year. Sellers can also be more specific and narrow down to a category. For example, they could ask, “What about my cotton t-shirts?” and Project Amelia will then offer an overview of that specific product’s sales, growth, and customer traffic.

The action and issue resolution domain of Project Amelia is still under development, but would result in Project Amelia being able to analyse complex issues and tasks by diagnosing problems and, in some cases, offering to take action on behalf of sellers. By asking Project to address an issue — such as, “I have 300 units on the way and don’t see that reflected in the report. Can someone look into this?”— sellers will receive personalised guidance, and if needed, assistance investigating the issue or connecting the seller with support to ensure resolve the issue.

Amazon said that subsequently, Project Amelia will also be able to provide additional help managing the task or even offer to solve the problem on a seller’s behalf.

“As Amelia evolves, it will provide a more personalised experience and will increasingly gain the ability to not only converse with sellers, but anticipate their needs, take actions, and resolve issues on their behalf,” said Mary Beth Westmoreland, Vice President, Worldwide Selling Partner Experience at Amazon in a blogpost.

The company has been rolling out various AI tools amid intensifying competition with Microsoft, Google and Open AI. A workplace chatbot called Amazon Q helps corporate customers search for information, write code and review business metrics. Rufus meanwhile lets consumers comparison shop and research products on Amazon’s web store.