Amazon AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant for Retailers

Amazon Is Opening Its AI Shopping Technology to the World's Retailers

Amazon has long been the undisputed giant of ecommerce, consistently ranked No. 1 among North America's largest online retailers. For years, the company has invested heavily in artificial intelligence to improve the shopping experience on its own platform. Now, Amazon is taking a significant strategic step by making some of that same AI technology available to other retailers through Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new offering, called the Agentic Shopping Assistant, represents a major shift in how the broader retail industry can engage with customers using conversational AI.

The move signals that Amazon is not only competing as a retailer but is also positioning itself as the backbone of the next generation of AI-powered commerce for brands across the industry. It is a strategy that could reshape how millions of shoppers discover, compare, and purchase products — regardless of which website they are visiting.

What Is the Agentic Shopping Assistant?

The Agentic Shopping Assistant is a new product available through Amazon Web Services that allows retailers outside of Amazon's own marketplace to build and deploy fully customized AI shopping agents. These agents are designed to interact with customers in natural language, helping them search for products, compare options, receive personalized recommendations, and ultimately make purchasing decisions — all within a seamless conversational experience.

Amazon developed this technology originally to power its own AI-driven shopping experiences, including the upgraded Alexa shopping agent. By offering it to third-party retailers through AWS, Amazon is extending the reach of its AI infrastructure into thousands of other digital storefronts. The company framed the tool as a critical resource for retailers who want to maintain a competitive AI presence as consumer behavior continues to evolve rapidly.

According to Amazon, more and more shoppers are already using AI agents to browse the internet, hunt for deals, compare products across brands, and even complete purchases autonomously. Retailers that fail to adapt risk losing relevance in an increasingly agent-driven ecommerce landscape. The Agentic Shopping Assistant is Amazon's answer to that challenge — not just for its own platform, but for the entire retail ecosystem.

Kate Spade New York Leads the Way with the AI Gift Concierge

Among the first retail brands to adopt the Agentic Shopping Assistant technology is Kate Spade New York, the luxury fashion brand owned by Tapestry Inc. Kate Spade has deployed the technology as the foundation of its new AI Gift Concierge, a branded AI assistant designed specifically to help customers find the perfect gift.

The AI Gift Concierge can hold natural, flowing conversations with shoppers, asking questions about the recipient, the occasion, budget preferences, personal style, and more. Based on those responses, it generates tailored gift recommendations drawn from Kate Spade's product catalog. The experience is intended to feel less like typing into a search bar and more like speaking with a knowledgeable sales associate who genuinely understands what the customer is looking for.

Fabio Luzzi, Tapestry's Chief Data and Analytics Officer, described the motivation behind the tool in a statement to Digital Commerce 360: "It's a conversational AI experience that helps customers find the right gift, and it came directly from listening to our consumers and figuring out what they actually needed."

This customer-first philosophy — building technology around proven consumer demand rather than deploying AI for its own sake — is exactly the kind of approach that industry analysts suggest will separate successful AI retail implementations from costly failures. Kate Spade's early adoption positions the brand as a forward-thinking leader in the luxury fashion ecommerce space.

Tapestry Inc., the parent company of both Kate Spade and Coach, ranks No. 40 in Digital Commerce 360's Top 2000 Database, a ranking of the largest North American online retailers by annual ecommerce sales.

Why This Matters for the Future of Retail

The launch of the Agentic Shopping Assistant on AWS is not just a product announcement — it is a reflection of where ecommerce is heading. Several important trends are converging to make this technology both timely and strategically significant for retailers of all sizes.

AI-powered search is replacing traditional browsing. Shoppers are increasingly using AI agents to conduct product research and comparisons, bypassing traditional keyword-based searches. Retailers without their own AI presence risk being left out of these new discovery pathways entirely.
Personalization is becoming a baseline expectation. Modern consumers expect shopping experiences that feel tailored to their needs. A conversational AI agent that remembers preferences, understands context, and provides relevant suggestions can dramatically outperform static product pages and generic recommendation engines.
Loyalty depends on experience. In a market where price parity is common and product differentiation is difficult, the quality of the customer experience is often the deciding factor. A well-designed AI shopping assistant can make a brand feel more human, more helpful, and more worth returning to.
The infrastructure gap is closing. Previously, only large enterprises with significant technical teams could build sophisticated AI agents. By offering the Agentic Shopping Assistant through AWS, Amazon is dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for brands of all sizes.

Amazon's Broader AI Retail Strategy

The Agentic Shopping Assistant is just one piece of a much larger AI strategy that Amazon has been building across its business units. Amazon Web Services is already the world's leading cloud computing platform, and its foray into AI-powered retail tools represents a natural extension of the services it offers to enterprise clients.

By positioning AWS as the infrastructure layer for AI-driven retail, Amazon gains multiple strategic advantages. It deepens its relationships with major retail brands, generates recurring cloud revenue from AI workloads, and gathers insights into how AI is shaping consumer behavior across the industry. This data, in turn, can further improve Amazon's own retail operations — creating a powerful feedback loop.

Amazon has confirmed that additional retailers are currently testing the Agentic Shopping Assistant solution, though it has not yet disclosed their identities. Given the momentum around AI in retail, it is reasonable to expect a wave of new adopters to emerge throughout 2025 and into 2026 as the technology matures and proves its value.

What Retailers Should Do Now

For retailers evaluating whether to adopt AI shopping technology, the Kate Spade example offers a useful blueprint. Start with a specific, customer-identified need. Define a clear use case — whether that is gift finding, product discovery, size and fit guidance, or something else entirely. Choose an infrastructure partner with proven AI capabilities. And measure success not just in terms of technical performance, but in terms of customer satisfaction and conversion outcomes.

The Agentic Shopping Assistant on AWS represents a powerful starting point for retailers ready to make that leap. As AI agents become an increasingly standard part of the shopping journey, brands that invest early will be better positioned to build the trust, loyalty, and revenue that come with delivering genuinely helpful experiences.

The age of agentic commerce is arriving faster than many expected. Amazon, characteristically, intends to be at the center of it — and it is inviting the rest of the retail world to come along.