AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant: Amazon’s AI shopping tech, now for any retailer

An AI https://novascotiabusinessjournal.com/category/retail/ shopping assistant is a generative-AI tool that helps you find, compare, and buy products through conversation. We focus on the assistants that help you, the shopper, rather than the merchant chatbots that brands bolt onto their own stores. This guide compares the five consumer AI shopping assistants you can actually use today, what each one does well, how their checkout works, and which is the best fit for your shopping style. AI shoppers now convert 42% better than everyone else. Imagining tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities—from AI shopping agents to cross-border M&A.

In-store computer vision monitors shelf inventory, checks pricing and planogram compliance, and flags spills or misplaced products in real time. Retailers now use generative AI to simulate virtual fitting rooms and interior layouts, design product variations (cutting time-to-market), and auto-generate ad creative, email copy, and landing pages. This is where AI meets the shop floor, and where it matters most for brands with physical stores. Conversational https://biolecta.com/articles/happy-hoo-ha-cvs-consumer-engagement/ commerce turns search-and-scroll into a guided dialogue.

Walmart said that orders from customers using Sparky were 35% more valuable on average. Shoppers can use the chatbot in the Walmart app or website to find products, read reviews, and receive personalized purchase recommendations. Alexa https://howtopronounce.cc/webyog for Shopping can help compare products, provide recommendations, track prices, and manage your cart, for example.

• By 22 April 2026 Copilot Checkout covered more than 500,000 merchants and had arrived inside the Copilot mobile app in the US.
• It supports strategy setting, product selection, supplier negotiations, and pricing and promotion optimization.
• In the retail industry, they are autonomous software programs that act on behalf of your business—like digital employees.
• Over 62% of consumers now prefer AI chatbots for quick answers, and retail spending via chatbots is projected to hit $72 billion by 2028 (Juniper Research).
• They analyze browsing history, purchase patterns, and dwell time to predict what a shopper wants next, and they get smarter with every interaction by learning across millions of customers.
• In-store, these machines assist shoppers with product information, guide them to specific aisles, alert them to empty shelves, and send real-time stock updates to backend systems.

Amazon’s new AI experience helps sellers visualize and grow their business in real time—here’s how it works

Some handle customer interactions, like guiding shoppers to the right product via chat, while others manage back-office operations, like inventory management. And while an ecommerce chatbot typically responds to customer messages within a limited conversational script, an AI agent can access multiple business systems, make decisions, and take actions beyond a single chat interaction. In the retail industry, they are autonomous software programs that act on behalf of your business—like digital employees. AI agents—or agentic AI systems—are intelligent systems that can complete tasks on their own. Here’s how AI agents for retail work and how you can use them to improve customer satisfaction and operational efficiency—and deliver exceptional customer experiences. And these capabilities aren’t reserved for massive brands with multimillion-dollar tech budgets.

Visual Search and Recognition

Anticipating trends is key, as is spotting new consumer behaviors or market gaps early on. It’s also better for savvy consumers who purchase products based on price fluctuations. Instead of sticking to a single, definitive price, AI considers the number of people buying a product, the prices charged by competitors, and the interests of customers. Content classification enables businesses to sort and organize digital content, including product listings, reviews, and advertisements.

• In the past year, more major retailers have gotten in on the hype, unveiling AI tools for shoppers to use both in stores and online.
• Instead of launching and operationalizing from scratch, retailers can deploy this proven solution in roughly 60 days with hands-on guidance from the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center team.
• And these capabilities aren’t reserved for massive brands with multimillion-dollar tech budgets.
• Chat agents can surface recommendations based on shoppers’ needs, making it easier for customers to navigate retailers’ catalogs.
• AI business models are trained on large amounts of data, enabling them to perform intricate actions, recognize patterns, and make decisions based on logical reasoning.
• It offers actionable tools and design patterns that can help teams move quickly from concept to production-ready deployment.

Chat agents can surface recommendations based on shoppers’ needs, making it easier for customers to navigate retailers’ catalogs. Purpose-built agents can also further refine the content development process by testing creative via virtual focus groups and running winning variants on various paid marketing platforms. For example, brands including Target, Gap Inc., and Nike said shoppers would be able to browse and shop their products through Google’s Gemini app and AI Mode shopping experiences.

• What separates an AI marketing agent from a simple content generator is that it’s connected to your business systems.
• Successfully embedding AI within your merchandising team goes beyond just adopting new technologies and tools; it requires fundamentally reimagining how work is done.
• The Agentic Shopping Assistant on AWS provides the proven foundation, and retailers bring the domain expertise that makes their shopping experience unique.
• Conversational and multimodal search surfaces the right products quickly, even in large, complex catalogs.​
• The thread running through all of them, and especially the 2026 frontier, is that AI in retail isn’t about replacing human judgment.

Advanced retail buying

In ecommerce, AI agents handle tasks like developing and deploying digital marketing campaigns and assisting shoppers on the website. Agentic AI systems connect to your business’s existing data and tools—such as your product catalog, email marketing platform, shipping provider, and internal documentation—to understand your products, policies, and customers. With AI agents handling routine support inquiries, Naadam’s human team has more bandwidth for strategic initiatives, like product development and marketing.

Benefits of AI Shopping Assistants

Visa and Mastercard are piloting agent-led payment systems that make autonomous purchases, and Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) is designed to let AI agents make purchases with user-set budgets and guardrails. Use Shopify’s free audit tool to check whether your structured data and robots.txt are set up for AI shopping assistants to find and recommend your products. Shoppers can find your products, compare options, and—depending on the AI platform and user settings—check out in the AI chat or your Shopify site.

Generating marketing content

Successfully embedding AI within your merchandising team goes beyond just adopting new technologies and tools; it requires fundamentally reimagining how work is done. It supports strategy setting, product selection, supplier negotiations, and pricing and promotion optimization. In today’s tough macroeconomic climate, merchants are under pressure to produce profits and unlock new income streams (e.g., retail media) as they navigate rising channel complexity, often while saddled with legacy processes that can’t keep up with this pace of change.

Through Gemini, Google has forged partnerships with large retailers and apparel brands to bring their products to its app and AI mode in Google search. Conversational marketing in retail uses AI to create real-time, context-aware dialogue between brands and customers. These tools are a consumer-facing cousin of the wider wave of AI agents, and they work for you across the whole web rather than for a single merchant. Restaurant chains understand their menus and customer preferences in ways no platform can replicate, and no one knows their products better than consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. AI sales agents can recommend products, answer questions, and guide shoppers toward a purchase. The Shopify Knowledge Base app works alongside Agentic Storefronts, giving you control over how AI agents answer when customers ask about your brand’s return policies, sizing guidance, shipping windows, and other frequently asked questions.