Amazon is racing to join the AI chatbot race. As pointed out by Bloomberg, the tech goliath, which serves 54% of all product queries, has posted job listings for a machine learning-focused engineer describing how it is “reimagining Amazon Search” with a new “interactive conversational experience” to answer product questions, compare products, personalise suggestions, and more. But this is not the e-commerce giant’s first attempt to integrate AI/ML to enhance users’ experience via Gen AI. 

“This will be a once in a generation transformation for Search, just like the Mosaic browser made the Internet easier to engage with three decades ago,” Amazon wrote. “If you missed the 90s—WWW, Mosaic, and the founding of Amazon and Google—you don’t want to miss this opportunity.” Furthermore, Amazon expressed its eagerness to swiftly implement these changes, stating, “We want to deliver this vision to our customers right away.”

Previously, Amazon’s search experience has been heavily criticised for its sponsored content and ads heavily bombarding the results. A study by The Washington Post showed an overwhelming number of sponsored products displayed under different guises. The products not only exist under the label “sponsored” but also covertly have their presence under “highly rated”, while many also constitute products from Amazon’s own brands.

In 2017, Amazon allowed its renowned assistant Alexa to purchase products through voice controls. Right from adding the products to cart to cancelling the order, the assistant provided features to ease the users’ shopping experience. Even though the company already had an existing product to upgrade, it seems to have decided to take the long haul for further improving its flagship search. 

Read: Who is to Blame for Your Bad Shopping Experience at Amazon?

Earlier this year, Amazon did release Amazon Lex, to help retailers build out conversational interfaces for applications using voice and text. The chatbot uses the same conversational engine that powers Amazon Alexa and is available to use in new and existing applications. But the company shied away from integrating the engine for its own purpose. 

Existing Alternatives

A chatbot is a starting point for users looking to shop with specific parameters. Ask ChatGPT-powered Microsoft Bing to show the five best colognes and it will pull up a list of five products, citing reviews from GQ, along with links to stores selling the products.

Amazon’s hustle seems understandable with its rivals’ efforts catching the attention of users. Currently, a search on Amazon yields a bunch of ads, followed by some genuine products. Hence, the search king seems to be in a dire need to update its service via AI. 

Two weeks ago at Google I/O, the Mountain-view based firm introduced genAI for its holy cash cow ‘Search’. With the latest addition, users can consider complex purchase decisions easily. When searching for a product, the users get a snapshot of factors to consider and along with product descriptions that include reviews, ratings, prices and product images. The reason for the relevant information is Google’s Shopping Graph, which has a comprehensive dataset of over 35 billion product listings. The Pichai-led firm stated that, hourly over 1.8 billion listings are refreshed in the graph.

Early implementations of genAI by tech giants Microsoft and Google have challenges, particularly when it comes to providing accurate responses to queries. Despite the setbacks, these steps show the potential for an enhanced Microsoft Bing or Google search, which could offer users insightful means to shop online.

Fashionably Late 

The past few months have seen the tech industry drooling over the potential of generative AI but that wasn’t the case for Amazon. The tech giant took its own sweet time to announce its foundational models, too, similar to the upcoming AI chatbot. 

In April, Amazon announced a foundational suite called Bedrock for its AWS cloud customers to leverage some of the most popular genAI models via an application programming interface (API). Apart from some of its own models collectively called “Titan” the announcement included Anthropic model for conversations and questions, AI21 Labs model for translation and Stability AI’s model for image generation.

Though Amazon arrived late to the generative AI party. Up until now, its releases have been strategically smart. With its latest under the garb chatbot on the way Amazon is definitely pushing for more AI coming its way but the company’s fate in the ring is yet to be determined.