Amazon has added another tool to its artificial intelligence (AI) suite, called “help me decide.”
The new Amazon tool uses AI to analyze users’ browsing history and preferences to recommend products with a single tap. Its personalized recommendations include “clear explanations of why a product is right for you based on your specific needs and preferences,” according to Amazon. Those explanations include insights from customer reviews.
Amazon ranks No. 1 in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 2000 Database. The database is how Digital Commerce 360 tracks the largest North American online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales.
Amazon is also No. 3 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces Database. That database ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV).
Amazon’s “Help Me Decide” AI tool gives consumers a condensed, personalized review of suggested products. It offers alternative options at the bottom. | Image credit: About Amazon
Amazon’s ‘help me decide’ AI tool
Amazon said it has made the “help me decide” AI tool available to “millions” of U.S. consumers in its iOS and Android apps, as well as in mobile browsers. It added that users can check if they have access to the tool by selecting the “keep shopping for” button at the top of the app or on a product detail page.
Users can press a “help me decide” button when browsing through similar products, unsure of which to purchase, Amazon said. They can also use the tool by tapping the “keep shopping for” button on the homepage.
The button to use the “Help Me Decide” AI appears at the top of a user’s page after they’ve viewed multiple products that are similar. | Image credit: About Amazon
The “help me decide” button appears on product detail pages after viewing several similar items, Amazon said. Users can also select an “upgrade pick” or “budget pick” option to help the AI match products based on specific shopping decisions.
“Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after you’ve been browsing several similar items, giving you confidence in your purchase decision,” said Daniel Lloyd, vice president of personalization at Amazon, in a statement. “Help Me Decide continues to build on our commitment to use AI to improve the customer experience by creating tools that make shopping easier and more enjoyable.”
The tool uses large language models (LLMs) and Amazon Web Services’ Bedrock, OpenSearch and SageMaker “to understand what you need and why,” the retailer said. It factors in shopping history, preferences, product details and customer reviews.
How Amazon is using robotics and AI together
In addition to AI on the consumer end, Amazon is using it to try to make its fulfillment operations more efficient before the holiday shopping season.
On the robotics front, “Blue Jay” helps Amazon’s fulfillment-focused employees with tasks that involve reaching and lifting. It’s a robot that coordinates several arms to perform multiple tasks at a time. It also consolidates “what used to be three separate robotic stations into one streamlined workspace that can pick, stow, and consolidate in a single place,” according to Amazon.
It claims it developed Blue Jay — from concept to production — in “just over a year.” Additionally, it said that process would previously have taken three or more years for earlier robotics tools that it called Robin, Cardinal and Sparrow.
“Years of trial-and-error were condensed into months of development thanks to advancements in AI,” according to Tyler Greenawalt, a senior writer at About Amazon. “Our engineers were able to iterate on dozens of prototypes for Blue Jay with the use of digital twins. These are an advanced form of simulation that now allow us to experiment virtually, using real physics to accelerate what we build. Combined with the AI, data, and learned experiences of our current robot fleet, we’re able to build systems like Blue Jay smarter and more quickly.”
Amazon is testing its Blue Jay robots at a facility in South Carolina. So far, it has been able to pick, stow and consolidate about three-quarters of the various types of items that Amazon stores, the retailer said.
Amazon’s ‘Project Eluna’ agentic AI
On a different side of its fulfillment process, Amazon has begun using what it calls “Project Eluna,” an agentic AI tool for operations managers.
It designed Project Eluna to help reduce the “cognitive load” of monitoring several dashboards “while responding to technology breakdowns, reallocating resources, and making rapid-fire decisions,” according to Greenawalt.
As an agentic AI system, Amazon has designed Project Eluna to “act with a degree of autonomy, reasoning through complex operational situations and recommending actions to operators,” Greenawalt said. “It pulls in historical and real-time data across a building to anticipate bottlenecks and keep operations running smoothly.”
Amazon plans to pilot Project Eluna at a fulfillment center in Tennessee ahead of the holiday shopping season. Initially, it will work on sortation optimization. Operators can ask it where to shift people to avoid bottlenecks, according to Greenawalt.
“The goal: less putting out fires, more foresight,” he said.
Hiring and firing
Amazon announced in mid-October that it’s creating 250,000 jobs in the U.S. for the upcoming holiday season. It intends to hire regular full- and part-time employees earning an average of $24 per hour with benefits. Additionally, seasonal employees can earn more than $19 per hour, on average, according to Amazon.
However, Reuters reported in late October that Amazon plans to lay off as many as 30,000 staffers across its corporate workforce beginning Oct. 28. At the end of Amazon’s most recent fiscal quarter, it employed 1.546 million individuals. That figure includes both full- and part-time employees and excludes contractors and temporary personnel.
The cuts would affect close to 10% of its corporate workforce and would be its largest set of layoffs since late 2022 and early 2023. As of reporting time, Amazon had not commented on the cuts.
Do you rank in our databases?
Submit your data and we’ll see where you fit in our next ranking update.
Sign up
Stay on top of the latest developments in the online retail industry. Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 Retail News. Follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and YouTube. Be the first to know when Digital Commerce 360 publishes news content.
The post Amazon adds new layers of AI tools, including an internal agentic system appeared first on Digital Commerce 360.
from Digital Commerce 360 https://ift.tt/XO84DFL
0 Comments