Amazon is staffing up for a serious push in agentic commerce

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has repeatedly said in recent months that his company will eventually partner with third-party AI companies to integrate some facets of Amazon’s shopping experience into external AI products.

Up until recently, though, the company’s biggest claim to fame in AI-powered shopping, other than its own Rufus shopping assistant, has been blocking AI bots from crawling Amazon.com and suing the AI startup Perplexity along the way.

But last week came news that an Amazon employee had joined the tech council for a new internet protocol, called the Universal Commerce Protocol, meant to help standardize the plumbing that would allow AI agents to shop across AI and retail apps more easily. (I took a quick victory lap because my prior reporting had hinted at such a move.)

Now we have a few more breadcrumbs pointing toward what Jassy and Amazon’s AI shopping leaders may have in mind in the months ahead.

Amazon published a job listing this week for a technical leader who would oversee “a dynamic engineering team responsible for Amazon's strategic integration with third-party agentic platforms, building the next generation of on-site and off-site commerce experiences,” the listing said. (Shout out to industry sleuth Joe Kaziukėnas for unearthing it.)

The listing goes on to describe building the technical connections between Amazon's services and third-party platforms, which could involve a couple possible directions.

The obvious one is on the distribution side, and it is seeming more and more like a matter of “when” and “how,” rather than “if”: getting Amazon's shopping capabilities inside other AI apps and assistants, whether in ChatGPT, Claude or other services.

But another could be on the merchant side, with Amazon recruiting retailers, brands or e-commerce software providers like Shopify to make Amazon’s Buy for Me shopping agent feel less like a scrappy experiment and more like a sanctioned way to buy from outside stores.

The listing doesn't spell out which is the priority, but the scope suggests both might be on the table eventually. Amazon says the role will lead a team of 40 engineers.

Taken together with Jassy’s recent comments, Amazon’s UCP council participation and the company’s more public moves around AI shopping, it is another sign that Amazon is preparing for a world where some shopping starts inside AI products it does not own.

At the same time, Amazon still seems intent on controlling where, how and with whom its commerce capabilities—and data—show up beyond Amazon.

If you know more about Amazon’s plans for working with third-party agentic platforms, or how AI labs, retailers or commerce startups are trying to work with Amazon, I’d love to hear from you. You can reply to this email or reach me confidentially on Signal.