See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Oct. 19–23.
The post This Week in Tech: AI Agents Clock In as Apple Buyers Wait and IT Scrambles appeared first on TechRepublic.
See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Oct. 19–23.
The post This Week in Tech: AI Agents Clock In as Apple Buyers Wait and IT Scrambles appeared first on TechRepublic.
Amazon announced new AI tools for its independent sellers Wednesday, led by a plugin that lets them run their Amazon businesses from Anthropic’s Claude or Amazon’s own Quick assistant.
The idea is to let sellers check inventory, adjust prices and update listings without opening Seller Central, which merchants have used for years to manage their Amazon businesses. Amazon says about 90% of sellers already use some form of outside AI to run parts of their operations.
“Our vision was that they would never have to log into Seller Central,” said Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon’s vice president of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, in an interview. “We would just bring it to them where they work.”
The company is making the announcement at Accelerate, its annual seller conference, taking place in Seattle this week. It’s also releasing automations that monitor a seller’s business in the background and can act on it with the seller’s approval, and an upgraded Seller Assistant that remembers a seller’s pricing patterns, inventory cycles and growth goals from one session to the next.
The stakes: Independent sellers account for more than 60% of units sold on Amazon worldwide, and the fees Amazon charges them brought in $46.8 billion in the second quarter, more revenue than AWS.
Those fees are one of the issues in the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against Amazon, which accuses the company of overcharging sellers and punishing them for offering lower prices elsewhere. Amazon has denied the allegations and called the suit “wrong on the facts and the law.”
The case is set for trial in March 2027 in federal court in Seattle.
Amazon’s advertising business, which includes the sponsored listings sellers buy to promote their products, brought in $19.8 billion in the quarter, up 26% from a year earlier. When it filed the case, the FTC said advertising had become “virtually necessary for sellers to do business,” and that Amazon’s combined fees take close to half of many sellers’ revenue.
Sellers are a tough and pragmatic crowd. The loudest ovation at last year’s Accelerate went to a housekeeping fix rather than a new tool, when Amazon ended commingling, the practice of mixing identical inventory from different sellers in its warehouses.
Which agents get in: By starting to officially connect its seller tools to outside AI platforms, Amazon is loosening its grip on the technology sellers use to manage their presence in the company’s e-commerce store, although it still decides which platforms to support.
The announcement comes days after Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse, a new AI agent that can shop on behalf of consumers, from its store. Amazon says outside agents need to identify themselves and follow the rules of the sites they use.
Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic, and the AI company’s Claude models already power Seller Assistant, the AI technology built into the Seller Central portal that answers sellers’ questions and, with their approval, updates listings and prices.
The company says more integrations will follow Claude and Quick. “We’ve built this in a way that should be modular enough for us to continue to publish plugins,” Westmoreland said.
How it works: Amazon says connecting Claude takes about 60 seconds and no coding. The plugin pulls a seller’s listings, inventory levels, sales analytics and performance metrics into the outside assistant, which can then act on the account the way Seller Assistant does inside Seller Central.
Sellers choose which types of data the plugin can reach and approve each action before it’s carried out. The company says it doesn’t see the other business data in a seller’s assistant.
The plugin is in beta in Amazon’s U.S. stores, with international expansion to follow.
Among other announcements, Seller Assistant is getting a new canvas feature, a visual workspace generated on the fly from a seller’s live data. Sellers can use it to compare pricing strategies or diagnose ad campaigns, and it redraws as they ask follow-up questions.
In addition, Amazon says it’s giving every primary selling account holder worldwide a free 12-month subscription to Amazon Quick Plus, available through Dec. 31, 2026, with two additional co-workers covered at no cost.
This year’s event comes amid a leadership change in the seller organization. Amit Agarwal, a 27-year Amazon veteran who launched its India marketplace, took over selling partner services in February as Dharmesh Mehta moved to become CEO Andy Jassy’s technical advisor.
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