Amazon Launches Rufus—An AI Shopping Assistant To Keep Up With Holiday Season’s Sales Boost

On Thursday, Amazon-the popular e-commerce platform-launched its brand new AI shopping assistant called Rufus" to keep up with the massive revenue growth driven by holiday shoppers in the last quarter.

A report on Thursday revealed that Amazon has closed $170 billion in business in the last quarter ending in December.

The revenue has sky-rocketed for the company, speeding past all estimations made by Wall Street and growing the company's total value by 14% compared to the previous year.

Hence, the company decided to make shopping easier for its customers with the new AI assistant. It will not only revolutionize online shopping but might also impress investors, considering this is the first big AI development that Amazon is using for its customer-facing interfaces.

On top of that, CEO Andy Jassy had also been assuring Amazon investors that the company will soon dive into AI Technology to keep up with the changing times. So it's a good time to fulfill those promises.

What Exactly Will Rufus Do?

Rufus knows more about the company, its products, and its policies than anyone else. During its extensive hours of training, it mastered the entire product catalog of Amazon, its shopping policies, FAQs, customer reviews, and so on.

It will let customers discover items in a very different way than they have been able to on an e-commerce website.Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO

On Thursday, Rufus was rolled out in beta mode to some select customers. It is expected to roll out to a few additional US Amazon shoppers in a few weeks.

Last year, Amazon launched a new feature that uses generative AI to produce summaries of its customer reviews. This way, you don't have to go through tons of reviews for any products. Simply read a crisp summary of all the reviews. This saves time and enhances the overall customer experience.

The tech giant had also introduced Q-an AI chatbot for AWS customers, priced at $20/year. It can analyze and troubleshoot different problems, whether it a network connectivity or finding the best AWS solutions for particular application workloads.

What Other Profits Did Amazon Make?

The growth in sales revenue was not the only factor that led to this big AI step. Last year Amazon Web Services made a massive profit which increased its revenue by 13%, totalling $24.2 billion.

There was even a huge growth in the company's advertising revenue-almost 27% year-over-year. And as per current predictions, the coming quarter is also expected to be profitable for the company.

As soon as the revenue reports were made public on Thursday, Amazon's stocks increased by 7%.

These new developments and profits have proved to be a lifesaver for Amazon, considering the previous year was quite troublesome for the company.

At the beginning of 2023, Amazon was dealing with geo-political uncertainty, inflation, economic slowdown, and a dip in customer demand post-pandemic.

This further led to huge job cuts in the company which highly destabilized the internal environment. The stocks had also fallen in value, the lowest being $84.

But thankfully all of that has changed for Amazon this year. Its stocks increased by 90% in value (from $84) and business has been running steadily since the last quarter.

This is the perfect time for the company to experiment with something new and step into AI to keep up with its tech competitors.

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