Discovering one of the best offers on the highest merchandise, companies, and experiences can develop into an exhausting train. The net is stuffed with choices, with countless knowledge about every selection obtainable to in the present day’s shopper. Maybe that is why individuals are more and more turning to AI procuring assistants for assist.
As of late 2025, roughly 250 million clients had used Amazon’s Rufus, and customers who engaged with this AI-powered procuring expertise have been 60% extra more likely to full a purchase order.
In accordance with Jane Ostler, Chief Insights Officer at Kantar, 24% of AI customers presently use an AI procuring assistant. She believes CMOs now want their manufacturers to actively service these non-human shoppers whereas persevering with to steer and entertain people by conventional attention-seeking channels.
We’ve entered a brand new part of digital disruption the place the client is more and more an algorithm, not an individual. This new deployment of agentic AI brokers would require strategic responses and a brand new mind-set. It could additionally require a brand new humility that results in the reshaping of enterprise fashions, as a result of AI brokers will not be responding to, or influenced by, on-line advertisements.
Amazon.com generates $56 billion per yr from advertisements, so it’s not shocking that the corporate is nervous about non-Amazon procuring assistants scouring its platform for offers. Final November, Amazon sued AI supplier Perplexity in a quest to disclaim entry to the corporate’s procuring assistants (and people who would use them to buy the e-com superstore).
Perplexity argues that kind of exclusion is illegal and unfair. On March 9, 2026, a federal choose disagreed with them and barred Perplexity’s Comet AI browser from accessing Amazon accounts or making purchases on customers’ behalf. Subsequently, the ninth U.S. Circuit Court docket of Appeals halted the order whereas it considers Perplexity’s request for a longer-term pause that may final by its attraction of the district courtroom’s resolution.
Perplexity claims that the lawsuit lacks benefit and is a “bald try” to dam Amazon customers from utilizing Comet as a result of AI brokers “don’t have eyeballs to see the pervasive promoting Amazon bombards its customers with.” In a Perplexity weblog submit from final November, the corporate didn’t maintain again. Right here’s a brief part of the textual content.
Amazon ought to love this. Simpler procuring means extra transactions and happier clients. However Amazon doesn’t care. They’re extra thinking about serving you advertisements, sponsored outcomes, and influencing your buying choices with upsells and complicated presents…It’s not simply bullying, it’s bonkers.
In conventional retail areas, the shopkeeper retains the appropriate to disclaim service to unruly customers for no matter causes they select, however does this kind of frequent courtesy lengthen to e-commerce websites? And can Amazon proceed to disclaim entry to different AI-powered procuring assistants so as to promote its personal and defend its promoting income? The courts could have their say, as will customers who could quickly direct their assistants to buy elsewhere.
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