Amazon this morning unveiled a new wave of agentic AI tools designed to act as proactive partners for the independent sellers who generate more than 60% of its online retail sales.
The upgrades to Amazon’s Seller Assistant and Creative Studio promise to automate everything from monitoring inventory to producing polished ad campaigns. Amazon says they’re meant to further empower the businesses that operate on its 25-year-old third-party marketplace.
Amazon’s partnership with those sellers has turned into “probably the most compelling and substantial collaboration in the history of retail,” CEO Andy Jassy told the crowd during a Tuesday appearance at the company’s Accelerate seller conference in Seattle.
Some sellers see a more complicated reality, where the benefits of access to Amazon’s giant marketplace come with rising costs, restrictive policies, and a sense of unequal treatment, as reflected in independent surveys from analysts, vendors, and consulting firms.
Meanwhile, an ongoing FTC antitrust case alleges that Amazon has illegally leveraged its power over third-party sellers through a variety of practices that the company strongly denies.
Bloomberg News reported last week that the FTC is separately looking into new questions about whether Google and Amazon gave sufficient disclosures about pricing for search ads that, in the case of Amazon’s marketplace, are heavily used by sellers to promote listings.
Those larger issues form a complex yet largely unstated backdrop for Amazon’s annual seller conference. Accelerate is taking place this week at the Seattle Convention Center, a few blocks from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, drawing sellers from across the country and the world.
Expanding on existing AI tools
As with much of the tech industry right now, AI is front-and-center at this year’s conference. It’s part of Amazon’s companywide effort to demonstrate leadership in a field where it has sometimes been seen as playing catch-up to OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and others.
Amazon says its existing generative AI technologies have been used by 1.3 million sellers. They include tools that automatically generate product listings from a photo or short description, suggest attributes and keywords to include in listings, and draft ad copy, for example.
The new agentic AI tools go beyond those capabilities to serve as broader assistants — in some cases acting proactively, with the seller’s permission, according to the company.
The additions to the Creative Studio, for example, aim to give sellers a built-in creative partner that can research products and audiences, brainstorm concepts, draft storyboards, and generate full video and display ad campaigns from start to finish.
“So rather than clicking a button, you’re actually able to have a natural-language conversation with a creative partner that is working with you to help you achieve your goals,” said Jay Richman, vice president of creative products and technology for Amazon Ads, in an interview.
Features of the upgraded Seller Assistant include the ability to actively monitor inventory levels, flag potential compliance or account-health issues, and anticipate shifts in product demand — even generating specific recommendations on pricing, promotions, or restocking.
With a seller’s approval, the tool can then take action by preparing shipments, scheduling replenishment, or adjusting listings directly through Amazon’s systems.
Going beyond generalized knowledge
Amazon says it’s powering the new tools with its Nova AI foundation model and Anthropic’s Claude 4 in conjunction with its deep knowledge of shopping, successful seller approaches.
That broad intelligence is then combined with real-time context about each seller’s specific situation and history on the platform — such as inventory levels, seasonal patterns, and promotions, plus the ability to act directly through Amazon’s internal systems and APIs.
“So it’s not just some generalized knowledge or generalized capability from all the history. It is tailored to their specific situation,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of selling partner services, in an interview about the new tools at the conference this week.
For example, the tools could create tailored recommendations for a holiday-driven business on exactly how many units to send into Fulfillment by Amazon — and then, if approved, schedule and facilitate the shipments, all the way down to creating the shipping labels.
Amazon’s access to confidential merchant data on its e-commerce platform has been a sticking point in other situations, giving rise to accusations that people inside the company have mined individual seller information to launch competing products. Amazon has repeatedly denied these allegations.
With the new AI tools, Mehta said, the company has been careful not to train its models with seller-specific data, ensuring that no confidential information informs its recommendations to a competing seller. Instead, Amazon aggregates broad trends and insights, and combines them with the seller’s own context, while keeping that seller’s information siloed.
“That’s really important for privacy,” Mehta added, noting that no one would want their personal data used to give a competitor an advantage. The goal, he said, is to build trust so that sellers are comfortable letting the AI act on their behalf with their permission.
The broader financial stakes are huge for Amazon and sellers.
- U.S.-based independent sellers averaged more than $290,000 in annual sales in 2024, with more than 55,000 of them topping $1 million in sales, according to the company.
- Amazon’s revenue from third-party seller services — which includes commissions, fulfillment and shipping fees, and related services — reached $156 billion in 2024, or nearly a quarter of its total revenue of $638 billion.
All of which makes it all the more remarkable that this part of Amazon’s business almost never happened. Addressing sellers Tuesday afternoon in an appearance with Mehta on stage, Jassy said the decision to allow independent sellers into Amazon’s online store caused “quite an animated debate” inside the company when it was first considered 25 years ago.
Amazon executives were unsure at the time that third-party merchants could live up to its brand and customer service standards. But ultimately, he said, after weeks of deliberation, they decided that more sellers would mean better selection and lower prices for customers.
“What we’re doing together is very unusual,” Jassy said, predicting that the new wave of AI tools are going to make the collaboration even more successful. “I still think it’s very early days.”
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