This is the latest installment of the Marketplace Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the ever-changing e-commerce marketplace landscape. More from the series →Amazon is starting to sell the technology behind its AI shopping assistant to other retailers, as the e-commerce giant looks to become a bigger player in the fast-growing market for AI-powered shopping tools.In a Wednesday blog post, Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing division, announced a new offering called Agentic Shopping Assistant on AWS, which allows retailers to build their own AI shopping assistants using the same foundation behind Amazon’s recently rebranded Alexa for Shopping experience, customized to their own product catalogs and branding. The service packages together architecture, software and guidance based on Amazon’s internal AI shopping systems.
The move takes a page out of Amazon’s cloud computing unit’s playbook. The company built AWS after developing cloud computing infrastructure for its own e-commerce operations, and it later grew into the world’s largest cloud computing provider. Amazon has since expanded that strategy into areas including supply chain services, cashier-less checkout technology and advertising.
