Amazon’s new AI agent will shop third-party sites for you
Amazon is starting to test a new AI shopping agent, a function that calls it ‘buy for me’, with a subset users, the company has announced in a Blog post Thursday.
If Amazon does not sell something that users are looking for, the Koop For Me function products will give users who sell other websites. Then users can select and ask to buy one of these products without ever leaving the Amazon Shopping app.
Amazon is the newest company that reveals an AI shopping agent, which becomes a member of companies such as OpenAI, Google and Perplexity, all of which have shown similar agents who can visit websites and help users make purchases. Amazon is all the go-to-platform of most people for everything they would like to buy on the internet, but for buying I can allow Amazon to record even more e-commerce activities than today.
Behind the scenes, Amazon’s AI Shopping Agent will visit an external website, select a product that a user has asked and fill in the name of the user, shipping address and payment details to buy it, according to Amazon.
Amazon says that the new agentic shopping function is being powered by his Amazon Nova AI models, next to Claude van Anthropic. One of those models could be Nova Act, an AI agent Amazon unveiled earlier this week that can use autonomous websites.
Amazon said in the aforementioned blog post that buying for me uses coding to “safely” in your billing information on third -party sites, so that Amazon cannot see what you order from outside his platform. This is a unique approach compared to the agents of OpenAi and Google, who require people to fill in credit card information themselves, as well as the AI agent from PerTlexity, who has a prepaid payment card to make purchases.
The surrender of your credit card information to AI, which is susceptible to hallucinations and errors, can give some users a serious break. In the experience of TechCrunch, AI retailers often last long to process requests, and they often stay somewhere along the line.
Amazon in fact asks users to trust that the agent was not accidentally not accidentally buying 1,000 pairs of socks instead of 10. It also requires that they accept less control over the shopping experience. If a customer has to return or exchange an order, buy it for me to the digital store, from which the AI agent has made the purchase.
We will soon see how many people are willing to take the leap.
