Amazon debuts shopping chatbot ahead of strong earnings

Amazon dropped a special guest ahead of its earnings call this week.

Rufus, an AI-powered shopping tool, joined the ranks of Big Tech chatbots on Thursday, hours before the e-commerce giant announced strong results for Q4. While the company’s $170 billion in quarterly revenue was fueled by holiday shopping, Rufus and other generative AI efforts also featured heavily in the call.

“Gen AI is and will continue to be an area of pervasive focus and investment across Amazon, primarily because there are few initiatives, if any, that give us the chance to reinvent so many of our customer experiences and processes,” CEO Andy Jassy said in the call.

Rufus, named after an early employee’s corgi, is the latest fruit of that investment focus. Amazon said it’s trained on the product catalog, reviews, and “information from across the web” to field shopping questions, make product comparisons, and give recommendations in a conversational manner. The company rolled out a beta version to “a small subset” of customers on Thursday.

“We’re at the start of what Rufus will do with further personalization and expansion coming, but we’re excited about how it’ll make discovery even easier on Amazon,” Jassy said.

The rollout comes as tech giants have rushed to push out new digital assistants of all kinds in the past year, including Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Bard. Amazon previously rolled out a chatbot called Q for enterprise cloud customers. It’s also teased some of the ways it’s using generative AI to enhance Alexa.

Like its cloud competitors, the company’s Amazon Web Services cloud division is also reaping the rewards of the AI craze. The company grew AWS revenue 13% YoY last quarter.

“We’ve seen significant interest from our customers wanting to run generative AI applications and build large language models and foundation models,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said on the earnings call.