Amazon Intros AI Integrations For Alexa With Square, Expedia, Yelp and Angi
Expedia, Yelp, Angi, and Square are building agentic artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for Amazon’s Alexa+.
The new integrations are set to debut on the virtual assistant device next year, Amazon wrote on its blog Tuesday (Dec. 23).
“We understand that a truly useful personal assistant needs to connect with services that customers rely on every day,” said Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo.
“Every new integration we add brings Alexa+ closer to handling more of life’s everyday tasks, changing how customers interact, discover, and book services. We can’t wait for customers to experience these new capabilities and are excited to continue adding even more.”
The post goes on to say that customers will be able to reserve hotel rooms, get quotes on home services and schedule hair salon appointments via Alexa+’s agentic capabilities.
For example, the integration with Expedia will see Alexa respond to customer requests to find, suggest, compare, book, and manage hotel bookings using Expedia’s lodging inventory.
The integrations with Angi and Yelp will expand the number of home services available to customers with Alexa+. There’s also a collaboration with Square, which helps local businesses manage inventory, communicate with clients, book appointments and process payments.
“With Square’s integration, Alexa+ will allow customers to discover local beauty and wellness providers in Square’s network, including spas, hair and nail salons, barbershops, and more,” the blog post said. “In addition to gaining visibility into scheduling availability, users will be able to make, manage, and reschedule appointments with service providers directly through Alexa.”
The announcement follows reports from earlier this month that Amazon had rebuilt Alexa+ with agentic AI, moving beyond scripted commands to autonomous task execution.
In other agentic AI news, PYMNTS spoke about the role of this technology in commerce with Adam Hiatt, vice president of fraud strategy at Spreedly.
Agentic AI “inverts the responsibility of the purchasing experience from one where you have a customer going out to the merchant to saying, ‘Hey, you come to me with what the proposal is.’”
Under this model, intent becomes an actionable asset. The agent’s understanding of the consumer in things like airline loyalty, preferred brands, environmental constraints and dietary needs becomes ingrained into the shopping architecture.
“We’re obviously only in the very first inning of the AI agentic driven personalized shopping,” Hiatt said. Still, even in this early stage, he sees “this idea that the personal intent behind shopping can be put into these personal agents” as the key transformation that will reconfigure the infrastructure of commerce.
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