Amazon Unveils Rufus AI Shopping Assistant

(RTTNews) - Amazon announced the launch of Rufus, a new generative AI-powered conversational shopping assistant, aiming to help customers make more informed purchase decisions.

Rufus has been launched in beta to a small subset of customers in Amazon's mobile app. It will progressively roll out to additional U.S. customers in the coming weeks.

The new shopping assistant is trained on Amazon's product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and information from across the web. It will answer various customer questions on shopping needs, products, and comparisons, and will make recommendations based on these information and facilitate product discovery.

In the Rufus search bar in the Amazon Shopping app, customers can ask questions or choose from a set of pre-populated questions. Amazon will provide answers through a chat dialog box.

Rufus generates answers using relevant information from across Amazon and the web.

Rajiv Mehta, Vice President, Search and Conversational Shopping, Amazon, and Trishul Chilimbi, Vice President and Distinguished Scientist, Stores Foundational AI, Amazon, said, "With Rufus, customers are now able to shop alongside a generative AI-powered expert that knows Amazon's selection inside and out, and can bring it all together with information from across the web to help them make more informed purchase decisions"

"It's still early days for generative AI, and the technology won't always get it exactly right. We will keep improving our AI models and fine-tune responses to continuously make Rufus more helpful over time," they added.

The company said it will continue testing new features in generative AI to make it even easier to find and discover, research, and buy products in Amazon's stores.

Amazon has been using AI very expansively for 25+ years. Personalized recommendations, pick paths in fulfillment centers, drone deliveries, the conversational capabilities of Alexa, and checkout-free Amazon Go stores are all examples of Amazon's AI initiatives.

The company now expects generative AI to change virtually all customer experiences.

In recent times, the company introduced several new generative AI-powered capabilities in its store.

The AI-generated review helps customers with common themes from thousands of reviews to quickly understand customer insights. Fit Review Highlights feature, which offers personalized size guidance and insights, helps customers determine which size will fit them best.

Using generative AI, selling partners are writing more engaging and effective titles and product descriptions, and enriching existing listings.

The company also introduced new advertising tools to help brands connect with customers and grow their businesses. These include a generative AI solution to help brands produce lifestyle imagery that can improve the performance of their ads while also making them more engaging.