Dive Brief:

• Amazon is exploring the prospects of agentic commerce, which is poised to change the online customer experience, CEO Andy Jassy said on a Q3 2025 earnings call Thursday.
• The retailer is embracing the technology internally with tools like the AI shopping assistant Rufus and Buy for Me tool, which can make purchases from third-party sites. Jassy also expects Amazon to partner with third-party agents in the future.
• But first, the third-party agentic AI experience needs work. “We have to find a way, though, that makes the customer experience good,” Jassy said during the call. “Right now, I would say the customer experience is not. There's no personalization, there's no shopping history, the delivery estimates are frequently wrong, the prices are often wrong.”

Dive Insight:

Amazon is exploring the potential of AI across its business, from shopping tools to customer service.

Rufus is a highlight of the company’s efforts, and 250 million active customers have used the assistant this year, according to Jassy. Monthly users are up 140% year over year, interactions are up 210% year over year, and customers who use Rufus are 60% more likely to complete a purchase. The tool is on track to deliver over $10 billion in incremental annualized sales. 

Agentic AI is still in its early days overall. Search engines account for a fraction of Amazon’s referral traffic, and agentic AI is a very small subset of that, according to Jassy. However, that isn’t stopping the company from exploring how third-party AI could change the nature of search and discovery.

“I think that it reminds me in some ways of the beginning of search engines many years ago being sources of discovery for commerce,” he said. “And you had to kind of figure out the right way to work together.”

About 80% to 85% of the global retail market exists in physical stores, but “that equation is going to flip over time,” Jassy said. Brick and mortar’s main advantage over e-commerce is that physical environments offer a superior way to narrow down product choices. AI and agentic commerce have the potential to make e-commerce the premier discovery channel, he said.

Jassy is bullish on agentic commerce, but Amazon is investing in other forms of AI as well. 

Millions of customers have used a generative AI-powered tool that offers audio summaries of reviews, and the feature has streamed almost 3 million minutes, according to Jassy. Tens of millions of customers are using Amazon Lens, the company’s AI-powered visual search tool, every month.

Amazon Connect, the company’s contact center service suite, reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate with AT handling 12 billion minutes of customer interactions in the last year, according to Jassy. Major customers include Capital One, Toyota and American Airlines.

Amazon’s net sales rose 13% year over year to $180.2 billion in the third quarter, according to a company earnings report. The AWS segment, which includes Amazon Connect, grew sales 20% year over year to $33 billion.