Amazon has been using Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for more than 25 years, and it’s deeply embedded into every business in which we operate. ML and generative AI are transforming every industry, and retail is no exception – everything from the shopping experience, to fulfilment and logistics, to the tools we provide to sellers to help them succeed in our store. Today, we’re excited to announce that sellers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom can now benefit from innovations that leverage the power of generative AI to greatly simplify the process of product listing creation as well as enriching existing product listings to better resonate with customers and help drive sales.
We’ve long used AI to support our selling partners. For example, we pioneered the use of AI for personalised product recommendations based on customer behaviour data, which enables sellers to surface highly relevant product listings to interested customers. We also use advanced ML models to forecast demand and automate inventory management, ensuring that our selling partners can better plan their inventory and make sure they don’t end up being out of stock of popular products. With AI-powered pricing tools, sellers gain insights into dynamic pricing strategies based on real-time data, helping them maximise their pricing strategy. More recent innovations include generating Premium A+ Content for branded products, including rich text, imagery, as well as generating augmented reality visualisations such as placing furniture in a room. Around the world in our fulfilment centres, we are working to make sure more of the products customers want are stocked locally and in the right buildings within each region. With the help of AI, we’re able to expand the selection of products that we keep as close as possible to customers, stocking more everyday essentials that customers order and re-order consistently, which also helps ensure faster delivery speeds. In Europe, we shortened the average distance each package travelled within our middle mile network by 25 kilometres in 2023 compared to 2022, getting products to customers faster and helping drive sustainability.
Recognising the transformative potential of generative AI specifically, Amazon is actively developing and deploying a suite of AI-powered tools designed to empower small medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A few weeks ago, we launched the ability for sellers in the EU and the UK to benefit from generative AI when listing a new product for sale. These generative AI-powered tools simplify the listing creation process, allowing sellers to generate compelling product titles, descriptions, and other details by simply providing a few descriptive words or just uploading a product image. We suggest product listings that are high-quality and designed to be engaging for customers in our store. This streamlines operations and allows sellers to focus on other aspects of their business. While this is still a relatively new feature, more than 30,000 of Amazon’s EU selling partners have already used one or more of our generative AI listing tools.
We are also leveraging generative AI capabilities to analyse and enrich existing product listings, automatically adding missing information and improving overall content quality. This not only saves sellers valuable time but also enhances the customer experience by providing richer, more comprehensive product information. Amazon also leverages generative AI to summarise product reviews, which helps customers to make better purchasing decisions and drives more informed purchases for our selling partners – driving greater sales and reducing returns. These are just a few examples of the many innovations we are working on where generative AI can help empower sellers to achieve greater potential.
European SMBs see value of AI to business
Interestingly, we found from research conducted amongst 2,500 SMBs in May 2024 across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK, revealed that the early adopters amongst those surveyed agreed that AI could or has benefited their organisation by saving time/creating efficiency (77%), improving content (74%), improving profitability (72%), enhancing customer service (70%), and enabling them to reach more international customers (69%). This aligns with what we are hearing from Amazon’s selling partners who tell us they are excited for how generative AI can improve their business operations, drive sales, and increase profitability.
The research also revealed that SMB business owners felt that by using AI, they could reduce time spent writing product descriptions from an average of eight hours to one hour and reduce time updating product descriptions from an average of seven hours to one hour.
The research further uncovered that AI-generated content can significantly enhance the creation of engaging product descriptions. Over a third (33%) of SMBs felt that AI-generated content can increase a product's discoverability when customers search. Attracting new customers ranked top (32%) as the key business challenge SMBs are facing, and making their products more discoverable through AI-generated content will meet this business challenge head on.
Finally, regular AI users report more benefits than those only experimenting with Gen AI, indicating that using AI offers greater advantages than expected. For example, 85% of respondents who are regularly using AI at their organisation agree that AI has significantly enhanced their business, particularly by boosting content quality.
Amazon’s generative AI tools are constantly learning and evolving, and we are excited about how these tools will get even better in the coming months to streamline operations for sellers, enhance customer engagement, and provide powerful tools to drive their growth and success.
