Amazon's next moves in AI shopping

Good evening.

Yesterday, friend of The Aisle Joe Kaziukėnas used his sleuthing skills to reveal ChatGPT’s plans to start offering pay-per-click ads to marketers. A couple of months back, ChatGPT also rolled out pay-by-impressions ads.

The open question is how well will these new ads perform.

So I’ll turn it to you all: have you or your company started experimenting with buying ads on ChatGPT? Hit reply and let’s talk.

Separately, I awoke this morning to an AI description of a motion alert from our Ring doorbell camera.

“A bear is standing on the sidewalk and looking around,” read the description.

My first instinct probably should have been “how absurd,” given the part of New Jersey we live in, far from any natural bear habitat. But I did remember a news article from a few years back claiming that a black bear had indeed been spotted along a river in an adjacent town.

So I clicked on the video. At first glance, no bear.

I watched it a few more times. Still no bear.

Instead, I could see a landscaping crew working on our next-door neighbor’s property, transporting equipment to and from their truck parked in front of our house. One of the workers was wearing a hood to help fight the early-morning cold. But definitely not a bear.

Ring is offering this new AI-powered video description feature as part of a premium subscription tier that my family doesn’t subscribe to, but that we apparently got access to through a proactive free trial. I was already a bit hesitant about Ring due to privacy and data-sharing concerns, and wary of integrating AI into our existing setup. This didn’t exactly help. Maybe a small example, but a reminder that these systems still get things wrong even before layering on more complex tasks.

Now on to the good stuff…

Last week, Amazon quietly but widely rolled out a new Rufus feature called Scheduled Actions. While I await the chance to interview an Amazon leader for a broader discussion on Rufus and other agentic commerce topics, I went to a company spokesperson who answered some questions I had on this specific rollout.

I also caught up this week with the co-founder and CEO of the e-commerce startup Rye that appears to be one of the only companies powering automated purchasing of Amazon products from outside Amazon’s walls, albeit on a small scale.

Taken together, the rollout of Scheduled Actions on Amazon and Amazon’s apparent willingness to greenlight some types of automated buying from external agents—even while suing AI company Perplexity for their agentic commerce approach— provide some clues about the future of AI shopping Amazon wants to see.