Amazon’s Rufus assistant adds new features for the holidays

Amazon’s Rufus assistant joined other artificial intelligence (AI) tools ahead of the holiday season’s busiest week in launching new features for online shoppers.

The ecommerce giant cited recent knowledge enhancements related to a range of topics. Those include shopping, categories, products, product search and recommendations. In an announcement, the company noted that it had made 50 technical upgrades, enhancements and new features. Ultimately, the changes are geared toward making Rufus faster and more useful, with money and time savings in mind.

Amazon ranks No. 1 in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 2000 Database. The database is how Digital Commerce 360 tracks the largest North American online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales and more.

Amazon is also No. 3 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces Database. That database ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV).

What are Amazon’s latest Rufus updates?

“We’ve built and keep improving our next-gen in-store AI assistant to be a knowledgeable shopping expert right at your fingertips — one that knows you and your preferences, can help you discover products, compare options and prices, make informed buying decisions, and even take action to get things done faster for you,” said Rajiv Mehta, vice president of search and conversational shopping at Amazon, in a corporate blog post. “Our goal is to save customers time and money by making online shopping even simpler with real-time information and insights of experts across the 35+ product categories in our store.”

Among the Rufus capabilities Amazon is encouraging shoppers to use are personalized results based on user preferences and account-stored shopping patterns. Those results may relate to reordering products from an Amazon account’s order history. Alternatively, they may refer to age-related details about children’s interests or other context.

In addition, Rufus will display visual search results, including Amazon Buy for Me options to purchase from non-Amazon sites. Amazon noted that iOS app users can photograph and upload images of their shopping lists.

Some of these features compete with similar offerings in new agentic commerce and search launches from ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity.

Where Rufus fits in with Amazon’s other AI efforts

Rufus is just one of the AI-powered assistants that Amazon has deployed publicly. The company has also added agentic features to its Alexa+ product, along with creating its Amelia assistant for marketplace sellers.

While Alexa and Alexa+ target more general use cases in addition to serving shopping needs, Rufus is used within Amazon’s primary app experience. There, it also serves customer service roles and can escalate customer conversations to higher levels to address problems.

For holidays, including Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Amazon will also use Rufus as a tool for recommending personalized deals.

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