Amazon Launches Chatbot to Enhance Seller Automation and Efficiency

Amazon has released Amelia, a new AI app that will help small businesses manage inventory, advertise, and track sales. This is part of a larger push by big tech companies to automate business tasks.

Amazon announced on Thursday a new AI app that, among other things, will help its independent sellers track sales, track inventory, and advertise their products. This is part of a bigger push by Big Tech to use technology to automate more tasks.

The program, named Amelia, can quickly answer general questions like how to prepare for the holidays and how a seller’s business is doing by checking things like the number of items sold and the number of people who visit their website.

The company says that in the future, the software will be able to help sellers solve problems like late shipments without any extra help from a person.  Amazon showed Reuters how Amelia can quickly get information about a seller, like sales data if they need it. It also advises how to prepare for big sales holidays, like running sales and buying ads on Amazon.

V.P. of Worldwide Selling Partner Services at Amazon, Dharmesh Mehta, said that Amelia is meant to give sellers “their personalized expert in selling on Amazon.” “They need to know a lot about all of these important parts of running a selling business.”

Amazon gets more than three out of every five of the items it sells from outside sources. Its relationship with sellers has been tense at times, especially over fees. Public Citizen, a consumer group, said Trump’s post was “yet another example of AI’s power to spread false information.”

Amazon might be able to handle complaints and other problems more cheaply if it automates some of the seller customer service tasks that would normally need human help. The Seattle-based store announced Amelia at its annual conference in its home city. A large number of its 450,000 independent sellers from all over the United States come here to get assistance and learn about new goods and services.

Amazon added Rufus, a generative AI search engine, to its website earlier this year to help customers find more products. Amelia comes after the announcement of Rufus. Since then, Amazon has started selling ads inside Rufus, which suggests that the company may let businesses pay for the software to make suggestions.

Amazon Invests in AI: $16.5 Billion in Capital Projects

It also has a corporate chatbot and is working to make its Alexa voice assistant better by adding an AI that can talk to people more naturally. In the second quarter of this year, Amazon spent about $16.5 billion on capital projects, up from $14 billion in the first quarter. AI investments were a big reason for this.

Since ChatGPT came out in late 2022, there has been a lot of investment in generative AI, which can respond to questions with full sentences or make images or sounds that look and sound like real people. But generative AI software can make up answers, which are called hallucinations when it doesn’t have enough training data. Mehta said that Amelia might be hallucinating and that these cases would be dealt with based on how bad the mistake was.

He said that Amazon had no plans to put ads in Amelia. He said that big brands like Unilever, which also sells on Amazon, will not be able to use the service the way it is now. Amazon stated that Amelia will initially be available to a select few English sellers. Over the next month, though, almost all U.S. sellers will be able to use it.