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Amid Google and Microsoft that often make headlines for their AI investments, Amazon appears to be a silent player stepping up its AI accelerator to capture business from the generative AI boom.
The retail giant announced today it will begin using generative AI to help customers better surface product reviews and scale back on time spent rummaging through a series of individual reviews. Amazon will enable this by picking up common themes and summarizing them into short paragraphs on the product detail page.
For example, a customer looking to understand whether a product is easy to use can surface reviews mentioning “ease of use” by tapping on that product attribute under the review highlights.
The tool is currently accessible to a portion of mobile shoppers in the U.S., covering a wide range of products. According to the company’s blog post, it plans to reach a broader audience and include more product categories in the upcoming months, based on customer feedback.
“Last year alone, 125 million customers contributed nearly 1.5 billion reviews and ratings to Amazon stores, making reviews an incredible resource for shoppers,” Vaughn Schermerhorn, director of community shopping at Amazon, told Adweek in a statement. “We want to make it even easier for customers to understand the common themes across reviews and … we believe we have the technical means to address this long-standing customer need.”
OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November spurred tech giants like Microsoft and Google to act fast and invest in generative AI. Microsoft, who poured $13 billion into OpenAI, was quick to add LLMs into its own products such as ad-powered Bing earlier in February. The company also opens up revenue streams with a $30 monthly fee for this tool.
Around the same time, Google too launched its own version of LLM—Bard—followed by an investment of $300 million in OpenAI rival Anthropic. The tech giant has also added generative AI to its search engine, but marketers are yet to see how this changes their search business.
“Amazon is used to leading markets, and their relatively quiet position in this space indicates an understanding of the impact that generative AI can have on influencing customer buying choices,” said Nicole Greene, senior director analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice. “Marketers need to pay attention to how Amazon consumers and their own customers are going to experience these efforts.”
