Amazon Sells AI Shopping Tech to Retailers via AWS
Amazon is now selling its AI shopping technology to other retailers, and Kate Spade is the first customer.
AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant
AWS has launched the Agentic Shopping Assistant, packaging the architecture behind Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping, which drove $12 billion in incremental sales last year, into a solution that other retailers can deploy in roughly 60 days.
May 27, 2026 – 3:55 pm
Image by: Amazon
TL;DR
AWS has launched a product that lets retailers build their own AI-powered shopping assistants using the same technology that powers Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping. The AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant packages architecture guidance, starter code, and hands-on support from AWS’s Generative AI Innovation Center into a solution that can be deployed in roughly 60 days.
Kate Spade is the first retailer to go live. On April 13, Tapestry, the parent company of Kate Spade, Coach, and Stuart Weitzman, launched an AI Gift Concierge on KateSpade.com. The tool engages shoppers in conversational dialogue about occasion, recipient, and style, then translates that into curated product recommendations. Tapestry describes it as the first production-ready retail AI assistant built with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Additional retailers are currently testing the solution.
The Gift Concierge runs on Anthropic’s Haiku 4.5 model through Amazon Bedrock, with AgentCore providing authentication, observability, and evaluation tooling. The Tapestry team spent roughly two and a half months in rigorous testing before making it customer-facing. Yang Lu, Tapestry’s chief information and digital officer, said at launch that AWS provided the recipe, but the company built the customisation its consumers needed.
The business case Amazon is making to retailers is straightforward. Amazon’s own AI shopping assistant, which merged its Rufus chatbot and Alexa+ into a unified Alexa for Shopping experience earlier this month, was used by more than 300 million customers last year and drove $12 billion in incremental sales. Conversational shopping sessions convert at 3.5 times the rate of traditional keyword search, according to Amazon’s data. AWS is now offering other retailers access to the learnings from that system without requiring them to spend years building one from scratch.
Each deployment is customised to match a retailer’s specific catalogue, customer base, shopping environment, and brand voice. Retailers bring their own product data, business rules, and domain expertise. AWS provides the technical foundation, which is built on Amazon Bedrock, AgentCore, and OpenSearch, and has been validated through billions of shopping interactions on Amazon.com. Amazon describes itself as “Customer Zero” for the solution, meaning every component has been tested in its own retail environment first.
The launch sits within a competitive scramble…