Amazon is beginning to check a brand new AI procuring agent, a characteristic it calls “Purchase for Me,” with a subset customers, the corporate introduced in a weblog publish Thursday.
If Amazon doesn’t promote one thing that customers are looking for, the Purchase for Me characteristic will show merchandise to customers that different web sites are promoting. Then, customers can choose and request to buy certainly one of these merchandise with out ever leaving the Amazon Procuring app.
Amazon is the newest firm to unveil an AI procuring 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 enable Amazon to seize much more e-commerce enterprise than it does at the moment.
Behind the scenes, Amazon’s AI procuring agent will go to an exterior web site, choose a product {that a} person requested, and fill out the person’s title, transport tackle, and cost particulars with a view to buy it, in keeping with Amazon.
Amazon says the brand new agentic procuring characteristic is powered by its Amazon Nova AI fashions, along with Anthropic’s Claude. A type of fashions could possibly be Nova Act, an AI agent Amazon unveiled earlier this week that may use web sites autonomously.
Amazon stated within the aforementioned weblog publish that Purchase for Me makes use of encryption to “securely” insert your billing info on third-party websites, such that Amazon can’t see what you’re ordering from exterior its platform. This can be a distinctive method in comparison with OpenAI and Google’s brokers, which require people to fill out bank card info themselves, in addition to Perplexity’s AI agent, which has a pay as you go debit card to make purchases.
Handing your bank card info over to AI, which is vulnerable to hallucinations and errors, could give some customers critical pause. In TechCrunch’s expertise, AI procuring brokers usually take a very long time to course of requests, and infrequently get caught someplace alongside the road.
Amazon is mainly asking customers to belief that its agent gained’t by chance buy 1,000 pairs of socks as a substitute of 10, for instance. It’s additionally asking that they settle for much less management over the procuring expertise. If a buyer must return or change 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 prepared to make the leap.
