Amazon Wants AI to Decide What You Buy

The tentacles of AI hype have already wriggled their way into Hollywood studios, record labels, newsrooms, kitchens, and maybe even the caverns of your mind. Amazon believes your shopping cart is next.

The retail giant is apparently laying the groundwork for AI-initiated purchases, starting with automatically generated buying guides; they’re out today for around 100 kinds of products, including TVs, dog food, shoes, and face creams. Amazon says the guides already point out specific features, use cases, brands, and answers to common questions. They’re currently exclusive to smartphones, and they sound a whole lot like an automated alternative to Wirecutter, but without the affiliate links and the sense that a human actually waded through the muck to find the best thing.

Amazon’s intention with these AI-generated guides, according to the company’s head of personalization Daniel Lloyd, is to “reduce the time spent researching before you make a purchase.” Amazon really wants to chip away at this, though Lloyd acknowledged that “it’s still early days.”

The new guides, along with Amazon’s shopping chatbot, Rufus, are precursors to more sophisticated shopping agents that could simply plop items directly into your cart and effectively click buy, Amazon AI executive Trishul Chilimbi told Wired. More sophisticated agents are part of the company’s “roadmap,” Chilimbi reportedly said, informed by the heaps of shopping data Amazon already collects. “We’re working on it, prototyping it, and when we think it’s good enough, we’ll release it in whatever form makes sense,” he added.

The path to such agents may start with chatbots that proactively ping you with product recommendations and ads, according to Chilimbi, but Amazon also says it’s planning for a future where you might just give it a prompt and a budget, and automate the research, browsing, and check-out process altogether.

Tech giants have raced to pack AI features into their products over the past several years, and in some cases, their efforts have driven down the value of human labor while at least momentarily supercharging valuations. The AI bubble has also spawned plenty of as-of-yet unfulfilled promises, including the loosely defined specter of artificial general intelligence.

While the AI bubble may actually be deflating, Amazon certainly knows how to wield a tech prediction to boost sales, as it did with drone delivery hype during the 2013 holiday shopping season. Now, Amazon seems to have done it again, drawing the eyes of skeptics and shoppers alike towards a (sigh) mountain of deals.