Dive Brief:
- Amazon will invest heavily in generative AI as a way to improve customer experience across its businesses, CEO Andy Jassy said Thursday on a Q4 2023 earnings call.
- The retailer’s latest efforts include the launch of the Rufus shopping assistant Thursday. The software can answer questions, offer product comparisons and make suggestions for Amazon app users.
- “Gen AI is and will continue to be an area of pervasive focus and investment across Amazon, primarily because there are few initiatives, if any, that give us the chance to reinvent so many of our customer experiences and processes,” Jassy said during the call.
Dive Insight:
Amazon continues to lean into generative AI as a CX differentiator for its businesses while developing applications AWS clients can integrate into their own customer experience strategies.
The company is working on dozens of generative AI-powered apps across its businesses, including several that have already launched. Jassy believes this technology and its associated CX improvements can generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue over the coming years.
Rufus is Amazon’s newest CX-focused tool. The shopping assistant can respond to natural language questions and return search results that match the nature of the query, according to a company blog post. Searching “I want to start an indoor garden” would bring up garden-related shopping categories, while “best dinosaur toys for a 5-year-old” would return specific items.
Rufus is still in its early stages, and additional capabilities will be added with time, according to Jassy.
Amazon isn’t the only retailer exploring generative AI shopping assistants. Walmart introduced GenAI search, which offers customers suggestions based on natural language queries, last month. Canadian Tire will launch its own shopping assistant in the near future.
Amazon is also working on generative AI tools for its AWS clients, including its Bedrock service. Recent additions to the software, such as guardrails to limit the kinds of questions apps will answer, are aimed at driving better customer experiences, according to Jassy.
Since the role of generative AI in customer experience will differ for every company, Amazon’s software development will focus on the need for a wider range of options, according to Jassy.
“It's a very iterative process and real work to go from posing a question into a chatbot and getting an answer, to turning that into a production quality application at the quality you need for your customer experience and your reputation,” Jassy said.
