Amazon’s new AI agent will shop third-party sites for you

Amazon is starting to test a new AI shopping agent, a feature it calls “Buy for Me,” with a subset users, the company announced in a blog post Thursday.

If Amazon doesn’t sell something that users are searching for, the Buy for Me feature will display products to users that other websites are selling. Then, users can select and request to purchase one of these products without ever leaving the Amazon Shopping app.

Amazon is the latest company to unveil an AI shopping agent, joining firms such as OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity, which have all showcased similar agents that can visit websites and help users make purchases. Amazon is already most people’s go-to platform for anything they’d want to purchase on the internet, but Buy for Me could allow Amazon to capture even more e-commerce business than it does today.

Behind the scenes, Amazon’s AI shopping agent will visit an external website, select a product that a user requested, and fill out the user’s name, shipping address, and payment details in order to purchase it, according to Amazon.

Amazon says the new agentic shopping feature is powered by its Amazon Nova AI models, in addition to Anthropic’s Claude. One of those models could be Nova Act, an AI agent Amazon unveiled earlier this week that can use websites autonomously.

Amazon said in the aforementioned blog post that Buy for Me uses encryption to “securely” insert your billing information on third-party sites, such that Amazon can’t see what you’re ordering from outside its platform. This is a unique approach compared to OpenAI and Google’s agents, which require humans to fill out credit card information themselves, as well as Perplexity’s AI agent, which has a prepaid debit card to make purchases.

Handing your credit card information over to AI, which is prone to hallucinations and mistakes, may give some users serious pause. In TechCrunch’s experience, AI shopping agents often take a long time to process requests, and often get stuck somewhere along the line.

Amazon is basically asking users to trust that its agent won’t accidentally purchase 1,000 pairs of socks instead of 10, for example. It’s also asking that they accept less control over the shopping experience. If a customer needs to return or exchange an order, Buy for Me will direct them to the digital storefront from which the AI agent made the purchase.

We’ll soon see how many people are willing to take the plunge.