Amazon’s Prime Day ends June 26—AI pushes shopping

Amazon’s AI – On Prime Day, which runs through June 26, Amazon is going all in on AI tools like Alexa and Rufus to turn deal-hunting into a guided experience. Early external metrics look promising, but experts warn that what shoppers actually do—often verifying discounts—ma

For the third day of Prime Day, the discounts are doing what discounts always do: pulling shoppers into endless product pages. Only this time, Amazon is betting that the real work won’t happen in the search results.

Prime Day, misnamed but stretching across half a week, is in full swing and ends June 26. Alongside blockbuster deals on a wide swathe of products, Amazon is pushing its AI tools harder than in previous years. New videos are promoting the idea that customers can integrate Alexa—or Rufus. Amazon’s AI text chatbot—into the shopping experience.

The pitch is clear in the way Amazon markets it: rather than leaving shoppers to compare and hunt for bargains alone, the company is trying to pull AI into the flow of decision-making.

That strategy matches a broader shift in how consumers think about AI commerce. More than half of U.S. shoppers are willing to let AI handle the entire shopping process, including the final purchase, once preferences are set, according to the payments platform Adyen.

Early indicators suggest the experiment may be working, at least from the outside looking in. Adobe. which tracks online shopping behavior during Prime Day and other events. says traffic from AI sources converted into sales 50.7% better than traffic from non-AI sources. It also reports that shoppers who arrived at Amazon from AI sources spent nearly half as long on the site as other visitors.

Still, evidence inside Amazon’s own tools is harder to pin down, and experts point to a familiar problem: shopper behavior is unpredictable.

“There’s a gap between how Amazon imagines its AI tools being used and how bargain-hunting shoppers are actually using them,” said Julian Skelly, managing partner for retail at Publicis Sapient. For now, Skelly says many shoppers rely on tools like Rufus mainly to verify whether a discount is real.

That use case, Skelly argues, helps—but it is not the destination Amazon is aiming for. “They want it to be a shopping companion,” he said, “rather than what is at the moment, which is more of a fact-checker.”

Timing plays a role. The technology is still new, and consumers often take time to change habits. Even so, Skelly says the tools face limitations. Shoppers want an AI assistant that can offer genuinely tailored recommendations based on individual interests.

“That needs much richer data about the person asking,” Skelly said. “Most of these tools are working from fairly shallow signals at the moment.” He added that the situation could evolve as adoption grows.

As Amazon leans forward, the rest of retail will likely be pulled along. That could reshape shopping for consumers and for the companies selling to them, but not in a one-to-one way.

“AI agents do not shop the way humans do,” Skelly said. A person on a product page may respond to images, layout, and polish. An AI agent, he said, needs structured information. Today’s product pages might include a dozen or so key details. but an agent may need far more data to make recommendations that feel meaningfully personal.

That shift could also change how people move through online stores. Ella Kersey. growth lead at the digital consumer experience agency Brandwidth. said tools like Rufus and Alexa are already making product discovery feel less like search and more like conversation. Instead of scrolling through pages of results, shoppers can increasingly ask a question and receive recommendations almost immediately.

For consumers, that speed can be a convenience. For Amazon, it’s a business lever: the company has every reason to shorten the path between interest and purchase.

Retailers benefit from collapsing time-to-buy. But Kersey and others emphasize that faster discovery may also make shoppers more discerning, not less. It could also reduce one of e-commerce’s most persistent headaches: returns.

“Ultimately, Amazon’s AI is both helping consumers buy more efficiently while also encouraging them to scrutinize what they buy,” said David Jennison, managing director for Europe at the ecommerce accelerator Pattern.

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