Amazon Gives Alexa 96 Hours to Prove AI Can Sell

Amazon is putting Alexa for Shopping at the center of Prime Day, using artificial intelligence (AI) to build personalized deal guides, track prices, recommend products and place orders automatically when items hit a shopper’s target price. The four-day event runs Tuesday to Friday (June 23-26), and the stakes are high.

According to a Monday (June 22) Reuters report, Bank of America expects the event to generate $21.6 billion in sales, up just 5% from 2025—leaving Amazon little room for the technology to underperform.

Amazon moved the event from July and is leaning harder into selling groceries, household goods, travel items and back-to-school purchases. eMarketer expects Amazon to capture more than 60% of sales during the event, according to Reuters, even as Walmart and Target run competing promotions.

Alexa for Shopping changes where the buying decision starts. Instead of asking shoppers to scroll through product pages and compare deals themselves, Amazon can use their shopping history and stated preferences to narrow the options before they reach the cart.

Amazon said in a June 16 post that the tool can build a personalized Prime Day Deals Guide, explain why each item was selected and send alerts when a matching deal appears. Shoppers can also check price history, set a target price and let Alexa complete the purchase when that price is reached. That puts Amazon’s AI inside discovery, comparison and checkout.

PYMNTS Intelligence found that 47% of online shoppers used AI during their latest purchase. ChatGPT’s share as a product research tool rose from 2% to 30% in two years, the data shows. Retailers now have to compete for the recommendation before a shopper reaches a product page.

Prime Day gives Amazon a closed-loop test. The company owns the product data, customer history, pricing, checkout and fulfillment. It can see whether an AI recommendation ends in a purchase.

Amazon Uses Alexa to Squeeze More Spending From Existing Prime Members

Prime Day has long helped Amazon add Prime members and train them to spend more often. That membership funnel is getting harder to expand in the United States.

Last year, Amazon added 3.9 million members in the three weeks before Prime Day 2025, down 185,000 from the prior year and about 193,000 below its goal, according to Reuters. However, the company brought in 1.6 million U.S. Prime members during the last year’s event, beating its internal target.

Amazon is also widening the purchases Prime Day is built to capture. The company said in its post that this year’s event includes deals on pantry goods, pet supplies and household products alongside electronics. Those categories can support repeat orders instead of one large purchase.

Prime Day Tests AI Recommendations and Auto-Buy at Scale

The commercial case depends on whether the tools work under live retail conditions. Prime Day compresses millions of deals, frequent price changes and time-sensitive buying into a 96-hour window.

The annual event is a stress test for AI-assisted commerce at scale. Millions of shoppers making time-sensitive decisions simultaneously is a real load, and the auto-buy feature concentrates the risk: once a shopper grants permission, the system can charge their default payment method and ship to their address the moment a tracked item hits a target price—no additional confirmation required. For that to work, alerts have to arrive while inventory is still available, and the system has to honor the price and product rules each shopper sets.

The last step carries a higher bar than product discovery. PYMNTS reported last week that consumers are more comfortable using AI for recommendations and comparison shopping than for payments and other final decisions. Shoppers still want more control when software moves from advice to spending.

Amazon’s design keeps several approval levels in place. Shoppers can use Alexa to build a guide, watch a product or authorize an automatic purchase at a set price. Prime Day will put all three uses into the same sales event.

In May, Amazon Web Services announced the AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant, built on the same underlying technology as Alexa for Shopping and designed to let third-party retailers deploy comparable tools on their own sites.

That move reframes what Prime Day is actually testing. If Alexa for Shopping performs—if AI recommendations convert, price alerts trigger purchases and auto-buy runs without errors—Amazon will have a proof of concept it can sell to every retailer that runs on AWS.

The real stakes aren’t based on Prime Day’s success itself. Instead, they hinge on who controls the infrastructure layer of AI-assisted commerce once the event ends.