Amazon introduces chatbot for its sellers, increasing automation

By Greg Bensinger

(Reuters) – Amazon.com on Thursday announced a new artificial intelligence-based application that will help its independent sellers with sales figures, inventory management and product promotion, among other things.

The move is part of a broader effort by major technology companies to leverage technology for greater automation.

The software, called Amelia, can provide instant answers to common questions, such as holiday preparation or a seller's business performance, including the number of units sold and website traffic.

Later, the company says, the software can help solve seller problems, such as late deliveries, without further human intervention.

In a demonstration of the software to Reuters, Amazon showed how Amelia can quickly pull up metrics for a seller, such as sales data, and offered suggestions for preparing for major sales holidays, including promotions and buying advertising on Amazon.com.

Amelia is designed to give sellers “their own personal expert for selling on Amazon,” says Dharmesh Mehta, vice president of worldwide partner services at Amazon. “It has to be an expert in all of those core areas of running your selling business.”

Amazon relies on third parties for more than three out of every five units it sells and has at times had a difficult relationship with sellers, particularly with regard to fees.

By automating some of its customer service for sellers, Amazon may be able to more cost-effectively handle complaints and other issues that would otherwise require human intervention.

The Seattle-based retailer announced Amelia during its annual conference in its hometown, where many of its roughly 450,000 independent U.S. sellers gather to learn tips and tricks and about new products and services.

Amelia follows the announcement of Rufus earlier this year, a generative AI search engine that Amazon added to its site to help customers find more products. Amazon has since started selling advertising within Rufus, suggesting it could let marketers pay in exchange for the software's recommendations.

The company has also launched an enterprise chatbot and is working to improve its Alexa voice assistant by updating it with AI that enables more conversation.

Amazon increased its capital spending to about $16.5 billion in the second quarter of this year from $14 billion in the first quarter, largely due to investments in artificial intelligence.

Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Silicon Valley has seen a frenzy of investment in generative AI, which can respond to prompts with full sentences or produce lifelike images or sounds.

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However, generative AI software can invent responses called hallucinations if it doesn't have enough training data. Mehta said Amelia could hallucinate and such cases would be handled depending on the severity of the error.

He said Amazon has no plans to offer ads within Amelia. The service will not be available in its current form to major brands such as Unilever, which also sell on Amazon, he said.

Amazon said Amelia will initially be available only to a small group of sellers and only in English before nearly all U.S. sellers will have access over the next month.

(Reporting by Greg Bensinger; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)