How Amazon Is Pulling Ahead of OpenAI With AI Shopping Agents

It seems like these days, every big e-commerce and AI company is racing to figure out how to make AI agents that can shop just like a human. In the case of Amazon, the company’s version of AI-powered shopping is becoming widespread enough to step on other retailers’ toes—evidence that it’s pulling ahead in the nascent market.

Earlier this week, Amazon sparked blowback from some small retailers that noticed they were showing up in a feature displaying items in Amazon search results even if Amazon did not sell them. Some business owners objected, saying the company hadn’t gotten their permission before listing their products, which were available through a feature Amazon calls Buy for Me. Amazon says the feature uses an AI agent to complete purchases on other sites on behalf of Amazon shoppers. 

Some retailers I spoke with this week said they think Amazon is using AI bots or scrapers to pick up their product listings for its site, and sometimes it has led to errors, like showing out-of-date product information to shoppers. (Amazon says that retailers can opt out of Buy for Me at any time, and that the feature is an experiment aimed at helping sellers reach new customers.)

Notably, Amazon is sticking with an approach other commerce and AI firms have mostly abandoned. Last spring, with the release of browser agents from OpenAI and Google, many developers and merchants envisioned personal shopper agents that would visit websites to browse and buy like a human would. But that has proven tough: Many websites treated those agents as bots and blocked them, and those that did get through struggled to shop accurately. 

More recently, OpenAI has been working on rolling out a checkout feature inside ChatGPT that it bills as an automated, or agentic, tool. Instead of crawling retailer sites, ChatGPT coordinates product data and order information between applications and retailers, mainly through existing systems like application programming interfaces.