Amazon introduces Amelia, an AI assistant for third-party sellers

Amazon is rolling out an artificial intelligence tool designed to help third-party sellers quickly resolve issues with their accounts and fetch sales and inventory data.

The company said Thursday that it's launching the product, called Amelia, in beta for select U.S. sellers, before introducing it more broadly later this year. Amazon describes it as an "all-in-one, generative-AI based selling expert," and is making it accessible through Seller Central, the internal dashboard for third-party merchants.

Amelia is the latest generative AI tool that Amazon has brought to market in the past year as it seeks to capitalize on the hype sparked by OpenAI's ChatGPT. The company has introduced an AI-powered shopping assistant named Rufus, a chatbot for businesses dubbed Q and Bedrock, a generative AI service for cloud customers.

Amazon also plans to upgrade its Alexa voice assistant with generative AI features, CNBC previously reported, and the company has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI competitor Anthropic, its largest venture deal to date.

CEO Andy Jassy told investors earlier this year that the "generative AI opportunity" is almost unprecedented and that increased capital spending is necessary to take advantage of it.

"I don't know if any of us has seen a possibility like this in technology in a really long time, for sure since the cloud, perhaps since the internet," Jassy said on the company's first-quarter earnings call in April.

Google and Microsoft have introduced rival products to try to ensure their relevance in a market that's predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

AI has also become more prevalent across Amazon's e-commerce platform. The company now displays AI-generated summaries of product reviews