Amazon Offers Alexa Shopping Assistant Blueprint to Retailers

Amazon introduced a solution that enables retailers to tap into the technology and learnings from its artificial intelligence shopping assistant to build their own conversational shopping experience.

The new Agentic Shopping Assistant on AWS (ASA on AWS) is based on Alexa for Shopping and can be tailored to each retailer’s catalog, customer base and shopping environment, AWS said in a Wednesday (May 27) press release.

“Each deployment is customized to match the retailer’s brand voice and domain expertise,” AWS said in the release. “Retailers get the technical foundation from architecture guidance, starter code and support from AWS experts and system integrator partners, allowing them to launch their own conversational shopping experiences in weeks—rather than the years it would take starting from scratch.”

Amazon announced Alexa for Shopping May 13, saying this personalized AI assistant combines the product expertise of the company’s AI shopping assistant Rufus, which was used by 300 million customers in 2025, and the personalized knowledge and context of its voice assistant Alexa+, which is available on hundreds of millions of devices.

One early adopter of ASA on AWS is Tapestry, the parent company of Kate Spade. The company used the solution to build the Kate Spade AI Gift Concierge, according to the Wednesday press release.

The Kate Spade AI Gift Concierge engages shoppers in natural dialogue about their planned gift purchases, including the occasion, the recipient and the style, to help them select a gift.

“We are excited about the possibilities agentic commerce can bring to our customers,” Yang Lu, chief information and digital officer at Tapestry, said in the release. “AWS brought the recipe, but together we built the customization our consumers needed.”

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The AI On-Ramp: Data Shows How Everyday Tasks Build Consumer Habits” found that “finding product links” is one of the activities for which AI is most often used. The report found that 31.4% of consumers used AI for that task in February.

Consumers of all ages, incomes and genders use AI for finding product links. Whether someone earns $35,000 a year or $175,000 a year, they use the technology to find products and compare options, according to the report.

“The AI value proposition, surfacing relevant links faster than a conventional search would, is legible to both,” the report said.