Amazon is beginning to check a brand new AI procuring agent, a characteristic it calls “Buy for Me,” with a subset customers, the corporate introduced in a weblog submit Thursday.
If Amazon doesn’t promote one thing that customers are looking for, the Buy 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 Shopping app.
Amazon is the newest firm to unveil an AI procuring agent, becoming a member of companies reminiscent of OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity, which have all showcased related 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 need to buy on the web, however Buy for Me may enable Amazon to seize much more e-commerce enterprise than it does immediately.
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 identify, delivery handle, and cost particulars as a way to buy it, based on Amazon.
Amazon says the brand new agentic procuring characteristic is powered by its Amazon Nova AI fashions, along with Anthropic’s Claude. One of these fashions may very well be Nova Act, an AI agent Amazon unveiled earlier this week that may use web sites autonomously.
Amazon mentioned within the aforementioned weblog submit that Buy for Me makes use of encryption to “securely” insert your billing data on third-party websites, such that Amazon can’t see what you’re ordering from outdoors its platform. This is a singular strategy in comparison with OpenAI and Google’s brokers, which require people to fill out bank card data themselves, in addition to Perplexity’s AI agent, which has a pay as you go debit card to make purchases.
Handing your bank card data over to AI, which is liable 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 accident buy 1,000 pairs of socks as an alternative 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 alternate an order, Buy 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.
