Amazon AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant for Retailers

Amazon Opens Its AI Shopping Technology to Retailers Through AWS

Amazon has long been at the forefront of artificial intelligence in ecommerce, and now it is extending that advantage beyond its own marketplace. The retail giant is making the AI technology behind its own shopping agent available to other retailers through Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new product, called the Agentic Shopping Assistant, allows brands and retailers to build and deploy their own customized AI-powered digital assistants — and Kate Spade New York is one of the first to take it for a spin.

This move signals a significant shift in how Amazon is positioning itself not just as a retailer, but as an AI infrastructure provider for the entire retail industry. As more consumers turn to AI tools to discover products, compare options, and complete purchases, having a sophisticated conversational AI presence is quickly becoming a competitive necessity rather than a nice-to-have feature.

What Is the Agentic Shopping Assistant?

The Agentic Shopping Assistant is a new offering available through Amazon Web Services that enables retailers outside of Amazon's own platform to build, customize, and launch their own AI shopping agents. Rather than starting from scratch, brands can leverage the same foundational AI technology that powers Amazon's own shopping experiences, adapting it to fit their specific brand voice, product catalog, and customer needs.

Amazon framed the tool as a direct response to a growing behavioral shift among online shoppers. Consumers are increasingly using AI agents not just to browse, but to actively search for products, compare alternatives, and even make purchasing decisions on their behalf. For retailers without the resources to develop proprietary AI from the ground up, the Agentic Shopping Assistant on AWS provides an accessible on-ramp to this new era of AI-driven commerce.

Amazon has confirmed that additional retailers are currently testing the Agentic Shopping Assistant solution, though the company has not yet disclosed their names. The early adoption pipeline suggests that appetite for this kind of technology across the retail sector is already strong.

Kate Spade New York Leads the Way With an AI Gift Concierge

Among the first brands to publicly adopt the Agentic Shopping Assistant technology is Kate Spade New York, a subsidiary of Tapestry Inc. The brand has used the AWS-based tool as the foundation for its new AI Gift Concierge, a conversational shopping experience designed to help customers find the perfect gift.

Unlike traditional product search tools, the AI Gift Concierge is built for natural-language conversations. Shoppers can describe who they are shopping for, the occasion, the recipient's personal style, and other relevant preferences — and the agent responds with tailored gift recommendations in real time. The experience is designed to feel less like navigating a website and more like chatting with a knowledgeable personal shopper.

Fabio Luzzi, Tapestry's Chief Data and Analytics Officer, explained the rationale behind the deployment: "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." That customer-first philosophy is exactly what the Agentic Shopping Assistant was designed to support — giving brands the tools to respond to real consumer behavior rather than hypothetical use cases.

Tapestry Inc., the parent company of Kate Spade and Coach, ranks No. 40 in Digital Commerce 360's Top 2000 Database, which tracks the largest North American online retailers by annual ecommerce sales. Amazon itself holds the top spot at No. 1, underscoring the scale of the technology now being made available to other players in the industry.

Why AI Shopping Agents Are Becoming Essential for Retailers

The rise of AI agents in ecommerce is not a distant trend — it is happening now. Shoppers are already using AI-powered tools to streamline their buying journeys, and retailers that cannot meet customers within those AI-mediated experiences risk losing relevance and revenue. Several key factors are driving this shift:

Changing search behavior: Consumers are moving away from keyword-based search and toward conversational queries, expecting AI tools to understand context and intent rather than just matching search terms to product titles.
Personalization at scale: AI agents can deliver highly personalized recommendations across millions of users simultaneously, something human customer service teams simply cannot replicate at that volume.
Faster path to purchase: When a shopping agent can understand a customer's needs, answer questions, and surface the right product in a single conversation, the time between discovery and conversion shrinks dramatically.
Increased customer satisfaction: Conversational AI reduces friction in the shopping experience, helping customers feel understood and supported rather than left to navigate complex product catalogs on their own.

For retailers, the question is no longer whether to invest in AI-driven shopping experiences, but how quickly they can deploy them effectively.

Amazon's Broader Strategy: From Retailer to AI Platform

Amazon's decision to commercialize its shopping AI through AWS is part of a larger strategic evolution. By packaging the AI capabilities powering its own marketplace and offering them as a service to competing retailers, Amazon is deepening its role as the backbone of modern ecommerce infrastructure — much as AWS already serves as the backbone of the broader internet.

This approach creates a recurring revenue stream from retail AI adoption regardless of where the actual transactions happen, and it positions AWS as the go-to platform for retailers looking to compete in an AI-first shopping landscape. As the technology matures and more brands deploy their own versions of the Agentic Shopping Assistant, Amazon stands to benefit from widespread industry adoption of tools it has already built and battle-tested on its own platform.

What This Means for the Future of Retail AI

The launch of the Agentic Shopping Assistant on AWS is more than a product announcement — it is a glimpse at where retail is headed. As AI agents become standard fixtures in the online shopping experience, the brands that deploy them thoughtfully, with genuine attention to customer needs, will be best positioned to build loyalty and grow sales.

Kate Spade New York's AI Gift Concierge is an early proof of concept showing that when conversational AI is grounded in real customer insight, it can deliver genuinely useful experiences. With more retailers expected to join the Agentic Shopping Assistant ecosystem in the coming months, the technology's impact on ecommerce could be substantial.

For retailers evaluating their AI strategy, the message from Amazon is clear: the tools are available, the consumer behavior is there, and the window to get ahead of the curve is open — but it will not stay open indefinitely.