Amazon Launches their new AI shopping assistant, Rufus

Did Amazon really just name their new AI shopping assistant Rufus? They sure did! As the story goes, Rufus is an Amazon legend. He’s an adorable corgi that used to roam the halls of Amazon’s HQ. He was the pet of their principal engineer and was found roaming the halls and chasing tennis balls. Today he is the inspiration of Amazon’s new, generative AI shopping assistant.

With the inception of Rufus, Amazon brings generative AI to their industry-leading online shopping platform and will transform the way that customers search. Instead of leveraging traditional keywords for search, users can now search with contextual prompts (commands). Instead of typing Men’s Jeans and spending hours searching through the options, you could prompt What are the men’s jeans with good reviews that stretch, are durable, and cost less than $30? Amazon will then search through all of their items and the internet to return the best information for your prompt.

While the launch of Rufus is great news for consumers, it’s daunting for brands and agencies that have worked so hard to earn top-ranking search positions. It leaves many questions about how to properly optimize product detail pages and what impact the revolutionary, new style of search will have on retail media.

For the full details on Amazon’s new generative AI-powered conversational shopping experience, you can check out a great, new article by our partner, The Mars Agency as written about the launch– Amazon Rufus: A New, Generative AI Shopping Experience.