Amazon planning conversational AI chatbot for website search

Amazon is planning to incorporate a conversational chatbot informed by artificial intelligence (AI) into the search experience on the e-commerce giant’s website based on job postings that appeared on the company’s website.

"We are reimagining Amazon Search with an interactive conversational experience that helps you find answers to product questions, perform product comparisons, receive personalized product suggestions, and so much more, to easily find the perfect product for your needs," read one such posting seeking a senior applied scientist for the Amazon Search team.

The postings, which have since been removed or revised and were first reported by Bloomberg, indicate that Amazon is looking to keep pace in the generative AI arms race and ensure that customers searching its platform have access to similar tools to those that Microsoft and OpenAI have deployed with ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, among others.

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Amazon’s posting touted the overhaul to its search functionality as a "once in a generation transformation for search, just like the Mosaic browser made the Internet easier to engage with three decades ago. If you missed the 90s — WWW, Mosaic, and the founding of Amazon and Google — you don’t want to miss this opportunity."

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the job postings but told FOX Business that, "We are significantly investing in generative AI across all of our businesses."

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In a late April investor call discussing the company’s first-quarter earnings, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that while there is much forward-looking discussion about investments in AI and machine learning, Amazon has "a pretty substantial investment in machine learning for 25-plus years in Amazon. It’s deeply ingrained in virtually everything we do."

Jassy noted that machine learning drives everything from Amazon’s e-commerce recommendations to its fulfillment centers, delivery drones and the Amazon Web Services cloud business.

"I think if you look at what’s happened over the last nine months or so is that these large language models and generative AI capabilities, they’ve been around for a while, but frankly, the models were not that compelling before about six, nine months ago," Jassy said. 

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Jassy added that "every single one of our businesses inside Amazon are building on top of large language models to reinvent our customer experiences, and you’ll see it in every single one of our businesses, stores, advertising, devices, entertainment."