Amazon Introduces Project Amelia to Support Third-Party Merchants
Amazon has introduced Project Amelia, an AI tool designed to help third-party sellers resolve account issues and access their sales and inventory fast.
On September 19, CNBC reported that a beta version of Amelia is only accessible to select US sellers via Amazon’s internal dashboard, Seller Central. The e-commerce giant plans to make it available to all sellers later this year.
AI Solutions
Amazon has launched multiple AI products in recent years. The e-commerce giant has previously introduced an AI shopping assistant called Rufus, a chatbot called dubbed Q, and a generative AI service called Bedrock. Amazon is planning to upgrade its voice assistant, Alexa with generative AI.
Amazon described the new AI tool as an all-in-one selling expert. Amelia is the latest generative AI tool that the e-commerce giant has launched this year as it works to capitalize the ChatGPT hype.
In April this year, Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy said generative AI presents an unprecedented opportunity and that capital is required to leverage it. Amazon has already invested billions of orders in OpenAI’s rival, Anthropic.
Focus on Third-Party Sellers
Third-party sellers form the backbone of Amazon’s e-commerce business. Since 2017, these sellers have accounted for 50% of products that are sold on the website. This number hit the 61% mark in quarter two of this year.
The prevalence of AI on Amazon’s e-commerce website is mostly geared to help third-party sellers grow their businesses. Visitors are now interacting with AI-generated product reviews on the e-commerce platform. The company has also introduced AI features to help third-party sellers generate ad photos and craft product listings.
On September 19, the e-commerce giant said it will be introducing tools that allow sellers to produce bulk AI-generated video ads and listings based on their product catalogs.
During the annual sellers conference, Amazon announced that it already started using AI to personalize product listings and recommendations based on customer shopping history.
According to Dharmesh Mehta, VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Services at Amazon, the number of Amazon sellers who use AI tools is increasing. Over 400K of Amazon sellers have already used it’s AI product listing tool.
Solving the Troubleshooting Challenge
With its new AI-based selling assistant tool, Amazon is looking to address the account troubleshooting challenge for third-party sellers. Currently, the company relies on large seller support teams to resolve inventory and account suspension issues for sellers.
Merchants have been complaining about delays they experience in getting their issues resolved or reaching customer service agents. The company says, Amelia can investigate account issues. In future, the Amazon AI tool will be able to fix problems on behalf of the seller. Instead of filing a missing inventory form, sellers will be able to ask Amelia to file the claim or get the tool to automatically resolve the issue.
“There are going to be places where, hey, instead of chatting with seller support or getting on the phone with someone, maybe Amelia is able to do that and do that faster. I don’t need to send an email to someone and wait for a response,” Mehta said.
According to Amazon, the AI selling assistant is built on Bedrock, a software that allows users to access the company’s large language models as well as those that belong to other AI companies including Anthropic and Stability.
