Amazons use of AI

I’ve been watching the AI / LMM field evolve over the last couple of years and every now and then I see something that promises to disrupt / transform an industry.

This development of Rufus by Amazon is one of those developments. You can read more about it at IEEE

I believe this will be disruptive to the shopping experience around specialist fields.

Often when you are buying something for a specialist purpose, for example hiking, skiing, fishing you tend to spend a lot of time reading reviews of all of the products you think may be a match to your use case. Jumping from website to website, forum to forum trying to glean information both about your use case to expand your understanding of your needs, and the products in question and how they match up to those needs.

Often, I find myself preferring to visit a specialist store to get advice from a knowledgeable experts to help guide my product fit. This expedites the research process, but it also often provides bespoke advice that is hard to glean reading online reviews.

Amazons Rufus may significantly close this gap in the online shopping experience, by providing contextual advice to you which would get better over time as it got to know you, and your preferences. This may also provide an unintended benefit to Amazon by providing more knowledgeable content as people interact with Rufus both before and after their purchases and how well they met the use case.

In my in-store research, I will often make the purchase in the speciality store where I received the best advice, but I do know many people (maybe the majority) who will then leave the store and buy the from the cheapest place they can find the product online.

This is a debate I often have with my wife. This places an unfair burden on the bricks and mortar store who is paying for the knowledgeable expert, and I try to support these stores by making my purchase in store regardless of a cheaper option online. Within reason of course, my wife would chastise me otherwise.

I believe Amazons Rufus and other things like it may be beneficial to these retail stores, as they may remove a large component of the browsing only shoppers from the store.

Either way, it’s exciting to see these developments coming and how they will transform the retail landscape.