Amazon CEO Reveals AI's Game-Changing Potential for Customer Experience - But There's a Catch

Amazon's Vision for Agentic AI in Customer Experience

Amazon is actively exploring agentic commerce technology that CEO Andy Jassy believes will fundamentally transform online customer experiences, though he acknowledges significant current limitations.

Current State of Agentic AI

During Amazon's Q3 2025 earnings call, Jassy revealed that while the technology shows immense promise, it currently suffers from critical shortcomings:

• No personalization capabilities
• No integration with shopping history
• Frequently incorrect delivery estimates
• Often wrong pricing information

"We have to find a way, though, that makes the customer experience good," Jassy stated. "Right now, I would say the customer experience is not."

Amazon's Current AI Initiatives

The retail giant is already implementing AI technology through several key tools:

Rufus AI Shopping Assistant

• 250 million active customers have used Rufus this year
• Monthly users up 140% year over year
• Interactions increased 210% year over year
• Customers using Rufus are 60% more likely to complete purchases
• Projected to deliver over $10 billion in incremental annualized sales

Buy for Me Tool

• Agentic AI capable of making purchases from third-party sites
• Represents Amazon's exploration of cross-platform commerce

The Future of Agentic Commerce

Jassy compared the current state of agentic AI to the early days of search engines, noting that search engines currently account for only a fraction of Amazon's referral traffic, with agentic AI representing an even smaller subset.

However, he remains optimistic about the long-term potential, particularly regarding how AI could transform product 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," Jassy said. "And you had to kind of figure out the right way to work together."

Broader AI Implementation Across Amazon

Beyond agentic commerce, Amazon is deploying AI across multiple customer-facing functions:

Customer Service Innovation

• Amazon Connect contact center service reached $1 billion annualized revenue run rate
• AI handling 12 billion minutes of customer interactions annually
• Major clients include Capital One, Toyota, and American Airlines

Additional AI Features

• Generative AI audio summaries of product reviews used by millions
• Nearly 3 million minutes of review summaries streamed
• Amazon Lens visual search tool used by tens of millions monthly

Market Context and Financial Performance

Jassy emphasized that approximately 80-85% of global retail still occurs in physical stores, but he believes AI could accelerate the shift toward e-commerce dominance by improving product discovery capabilities.

Amazon's Q3 2025 results showed:

• 13% year-over-year growth in net sales to $180.2 billion
• AWS segment growth of 20% to $33 billion
• Strong performance across cloud and AI services

The company continues to invest heavily in AI development while acknowledging that agentic commerce requires significant refinement before delivering optimal customer experiences.