AWS has launched the Agentic Shopping Assistant, packaging the technology behind Amazon's Alexa for Shopping into a deployable solution for other retailers. Kate Spade (via parent company Tapestry) is the first live customer, running an AI Gift Concierge on Anthropic's Haiku 4.5 through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. The solution promises a roughly 60-day deployment timeline and is built on Bedrock, AgentCore, and OpenSearch. Amazon's pitch to retailers is that conversational shopping converts at 3.5x the rate of keyword search, and that owning their own AI shopping presence is preferable to ceding the customer relationship to intermediaries like ChatGPT or Google's Universal Cart. The move positions AWS within a broader competitive race to control AI-powered commerce infrastructure, alongside Stripe's Agentic Commerce Suite and Google's Universal Cart. A key tension remains: Amazon is simultaneously the world's largest online retailer and the cloud provider selling AI shopping tools to competing retailers.
