Amazon is defining the beginnings of the agentic model

We look at new agentic features and ad formats on the Amazon platform, and examine how agentic commerce has evolved in the past year.

There’s no tech company that has changed category dynamics and checkout experience quite like Amazon. So, if any ecommerce company can introduce agentic features that gradually see users adapting to autonomous purchasing, you could argue it’s likely to be the logistics giant.

Indeed, Amazon figures show how customers on the platform have been increasingly using agentic features for product research and to take action. In April 2026, CEO Andy Jassy revealed that monthly active users for its chatbot Rufus were up 115% year over year.

Rufus was used by 300 million customers in 2025, driving nearly $12 billion in incremental sales. Amazon has also disclosed that customers using Rufus are 60% more likely to complete a purchase.

The AI assistant was folded into Amazon’s main search bar and rebranded as Alexa for Shopping in May 2026. It is the entry point for a range of agentic features such as scheduled actions (repeat purchases), price alerts (buy this TV if it drops below £300) and ‘Buy for Me’ (which permits an autonomous transaction on the shopper’s behalf on an external website).

The power of deep customer data

The potential power of Alexa for Shopping is in the combination of product research and agentic actions with Amazon’s deep understanding of customer preferences. Personalised insights allow the AI assistant to provide tailored answers to questions ranging from, “When will my package arrive?” to “What gifts might be popular with my children?”

You can even see the value it brings to customer experience in those unremarkable but frustrating tasks that shoppers have to complete, such as finding something in their order history. So, though you might use the search bar to ask big category-level questions (“What’s a good affordable TV for the World Cup?”), you can also ask, “What guitar did I buy?” (something this author did when I bought a new guitar bag for my son and couldn’t remember what size guitar he has – I just asked straight in the search bar).

Discovery has always been a blessing and a curse for Amazon. It drives their advertising revenue, but historically customers have sometimes been daunted by such an enormous assortment of products or by unconvincing promoted offerings. AI assistance looks like it is creating something closer to the ‘conversational commerce’ experience that has been trailed by ecomm platforms for so long.

At the end of June 2026, Amazon announced it would be bringing this expertise in conversational commerce to retailers outside of Amazon, by packaging it with the Agentic Shopping Assistant on AWS. Retailers such as launch partner Kate Spade will get “a new AI retail solution that brings learnings and expertise gained from building Alexa for Shopping”. In layman’s terms, that means a shopping assistant on retail websites that can be launched in weeks and plugs in to your retail data.

For now, the agentic model is predicated on ads

In March 2026, Amazon launched Sponsored Products prompts and Sponsored Brands prompts. These are features which appear in shopping results and product details pages and act as product experts, offering advice and moving shoppers into a chat intended to deepen their trust in that product. Since their introduction, 20% of shoppers interacting with Sponsored Brands prompts have continued chatting with Rufus about that brand.

That’s an impressive stat, and it shows (alongside Google’s ad products and OpenAI’s shift from a checkout model to an ads model) that advertising will play a central role in the burgeoning development of agentic commerce.

Effectively, an agent will do a lot of the business of product research and comparison, finding the best price, and even adding to cart and then completing the purchase if required. But within this process, brands will be able to pay to nudge shoppers towards discovering their products.

In a June news release, Amazon listed all its agentic ad formats now available, showing how quickly conversational ads are becoming part of the marketplace experience.

Amazon still aims to offer more choice

Amazon’s strategy to be the place where product searches start could ultimately be tested by the agentic revolution (it’s one area of debate amongst retail analysts at the moment).

But the one-time bookstore pureplay has decided, though it has joined the Universal Commerce Protocol, not to open its own data feeds up to the UCP. That means Amazon agents can go around the web buying for Amazon customers, but other agents can’t come and buy Amazon SKUs.

For now, Amazon wants to offer more than even an independent agent can find. What happens in the medium term, and how far agentic actions creep into daily shopping habits, will be fascinating to see.

This article is an edited version of a chapter in CTI Digital’s Agentic Commerce Landscape Review. Download it now.