Key Takeaways
- Rufus is an AI assistant in the Amazon shopping app and website. Powered by generative and agentic AI, it makes shopping faster and easier by giving customers useful information and product recommendations.
- Rufus tailors responses and recommendations by analyzing each customer’s Amazon activity and the context of their shopping conversations.
- Built on Amazon Bedrock, Rufus leverages advanced language models to generate AI shopping experiences using Amazon’s product catalog, reviews, Q&As, and web content.
Since launching Rufus last year, they have rapidly innovated to make it the best AI shopping assistant. It’s now smarter, more capable, conversational, and more helpful. Significant upgrades to its core capabilities in intelligence, reasoning, and performance have been made. These updates include expanding its general knowledge of the shopping category, conducting product research and evaluation, and providing product search and recommendations. We’ve introduced over 50 technical upgrades and new features to make it a faster, more useful shopping companion that saves customers time and money.
Our AI shopping assistant has helped customers billions of times, and we have continuously enhanced its neural network by expanding its knowledge graph, product attributes, and customer choices. Using a real-time router, it combines models accessed through Amazon Bedrock. This enables our AI assistant to quickly scale to serve hundreds of millions of users with flexible model selection, including Anthropic’s Claude, Sonnet, Amazon Nova, and a custom model based on Amazon’s store knowledge. It optimizes fork capability, latency, and answer quality across several query pages. It also uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to obtain insights and recommendations from sources like The New York Times, USA Today, Good Housekeeping, and Vogue when answering questions about products and trends. Friends.
Our AI assistant can solve customer problems and answer a wide range of questions at any stage of the shopping journey, exhibiting flexibility, intelligence, and multi-step reasoning. It can quickly handle everything from broad questions that inform a shopping trip to highly specific questions about product details. This adaptability enables our in-store shopping assistant to serve as both a knowledgeable shopping consultant for high-level problem-solving and product discovery, and a product expert capable of providing comprehensive comparisons and answering detailed product questions.
More than 250 million customers have used Rufus this year, with monthly average users up 149% and interactions up 210% over the past year. Customers who use it while shopping are over 60% more likely to make a purchase during that trip. Our shopping assistant is easy to find. It’s available in the Amazon Shopping app on desktop and throughout our store, including on the home page, product details pages, and in the Amazon Lens live experience. To start chatting, type natural-language queries into the chat bar or tap the microphone to speak.
Rajiv Mehta, Vice President of Search and Conversational Shopping at Amazon, said we’ve built and continue to improve our next-gen in-store AI assistant to be a knowledgeable shopping expert right at your fingertips. It knows you and your preferences, helps you discover products, compare options and prices, make informed buying decisions, and even take action to help you get things done faster. Our goal is to save customers time and money by making online shopping simpler with real-time information and analysis. This expertise covers more than 35 product categories in our store.
A Personalized Experience Based On Your Preferences And Shopping Patterns
Our AI assistant now has account memory, learning from each customer’s shopping activity. Whether you are an avid trail runner, a building or budding artist, a fashionista, or a documentary film buff, it provides more personalized and relevant answers and product search results. If you’ve shared that you have 5- and 8-year-old sons who love sports, a shedding golden retriever, or a preference for organic produce, it remembers and uses those details when generating answers and search results. For example, if you ask Rufus for holiday gifts for your kids, it will recommend age-appropriate books about legendary athletes, sports-themed video games for the Xbox, and athletic apparel. If you ask about the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, our AI assistant will highlight how cleaning up pet hair is a key feature. Or if you are looking for groceries for your favorite pasta recipe, it’s best to choose organic tomatoes.
You can also chat with our AI assistant and ask it to reorder items you’ve browsed or shopped for in the past. For example, reorder everything we used to make pumpkin pie last week or order the hiking boots and poles I browsed yesterday. Rufus connects the dots between past activity and current shopping needs, suggests alternatives when items are unavailable, and uses agentic AI to automatically add items to your cart for you to review before checking out.
You can ask it to share what shopping information it remembers about you, and to add new information to inform its recommendations and make corrections, all via natural conversation, to improve and personalize the experience in the coming months. Our AI assistants will also remember your activity across Amazon’s digital services, such as Kindle, Prime Video, and Audible.
Advanced text and visual search
Rufus has new text and visual search features that help customers find inspiration and solve problems. Customers can search for and discover products based on activity, event, purpose, or other specific topics, whether they are looking for what they need for a day of golf, baking a cake, hosting a holiday party, or getting school supplies for their third grader. If either suggesting shoppable product categories to browse or specific items to quickly add to your cart, a search like “what items do I need to host a frozen-themed birthday party for my daughter” will find everything from decorations and tableware to games and party favors. You can select items one by one or ask it to add all items to your cart.
Our AI assistant can help you quickly find inspiration from your favorite influencers’ storefronts by asking for a specific person, such as “Find Page Dish Sorbo’s storefront.” You can use it to discover products not currently available on Amazon’s store. Type a branded search; Rufus shows products available on Amazon and from other merchants. It either shows a “Buy for me” button that lets Amazon purchase the item for you or a “Shop direct” button that directs you to the merchant’s website to complete your purchase.
If you use iOS and handwrite your grocery or holiday shopping lists, you can now snap a photo and upload it. Our AI assistant will add the items to your cart. You can also upload photos and ask our assistant to find similar products or help you solve a problem. For example, upload a photo of a stained rug and ask, “How do I remove this coffee stain from my rug?” Rufus will examine the fabric and suggest relevant cleaning supplies. These features will be available to Android customers soon.
Saving Money Through Historical Price Tracking, Price Alerts, Auto-Buying, and Deal Finding
Our AI shopping assistant now shows a 30- and 90-day price tracker so customers can quickly evaluate past pricing and see if they are getting a great deal. Simply ask roofers for price history when browsing an item. Customers can set a price alert to be notified when a product reaches a target price, and Prime members can ask our AI assistant to automatically buy the item. Our shopping assistant will check prices frequently, complete the purchase using your default payment method and shipping address, and send a notification with free 24-hour cancellation if you change your mind. Auto-buy requests remain active for 6 months or until you cancel, and customers save an average of 20 percent per purchase.
You can use our shopping assistant to search by price and find items that fit your budget, such as men’s jeans under $40 or the best toys under $15. Rufus finds smart deals by combing through Amazon’s selection and offers customized deals daily, including during major sales events. You can find the best deals across the store and in our top categories. Rufus also shows offers based on your browsing cart and wish list activity.
Fast, Simple Customer Service
Our AI assistant is a 24/7 customer service expert. It can help track packages and deliveries, answer questions about your order status, and explain return and refund processes. It guides you through replacements for damaged items, order changes, cancellations, or returns. The assistant also helps with account settings, payment, billing, login, and security questions. It guides you to the right support resources and connects you with a live customer service representative if needed.
AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our time, and we are excited to continue inventing for customers. We will keep rolling out and improving these experiences to make roofers more helpful. The next time you are shopping on Amazon, put our AI assistant to work and make your shopping experience simpler, faster, and more fun.
Sample Questions To Try Using Our AI Assistant
Research products
- Does this blender crush ice?
- Is this water bottle dishwasher safe?
- Compare this with the espresso machine in my cart.
Find Deals
- Are there any items on my wish list on sale?
- Show deals for me.
- Find deals on a birthday present for my mom, who enjoys gardening and yoga.
Reorder your favorite products
- Order my regular coffee, La Croix deodorant.
- Restock my pet supplies.
- Order everything, I browsed yesterday.
Source: Amazon’s next-gen AI assistant for shopping is now even smarter, more capable, and more helpful
