Amazon is bringing a generative AI tool to their shopping platform to help answer shoppers’ questions.
How will consumers respond when they can ask an AI anything about a product right from the product’s listing page?
My guess is they respond in ways Amazon could never imagine.
What could possibly go wrong?
In an article on CNBC their new generative AI tool is described as enabling shoppers to ask questions about a specific product in order to save them from having to “scroll through pages of reviews or reading through a listing to find information about an item.”
The new feature is being rolled out only on Amazon’s mobile app, and will prompt a shopper to ask a question about a specific item, and then return an answer within a few seconds with a summary of information from the products listing and reviews of the product by other shoppers.
I won’t lie – this could actually save me a TON of time. I spend a lot of time scrolling through product listings on Amazon trying to figure out if the product fits exactly what I’m looking for, if it has good reviews from other users, and what if any issues others have experienced with the product. A summary of all that would save me literally hours a week in my research.
Sign me up today!
Before you go thinking that Amazon’s new AI will hallucinate answers to shopper’s questions, rest assured some failsafes have been baked into the software. Amazon’s generative AI isn’t like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This new feature from Amazon can’t carry out a conversation with shoppers; it just returns results of a query in the form of a summary.
Here’s where Amazon’s engineers had a little fun. You can get your summary in boring, basic conversational format, or you could request Amazon to write you a haiku about the product.
Still too tame for you?
How about asking it to respond in the style of Yoda from Star Wars?
Attention you now have of me.
Amazon launches generative AI tool to answer shoppers’ questions