The news: Amazon quietly introduced agentic shopping capabilities to its Rufus chatbot last week.

• Customers can now ask Rufus to monitor products and make a purchase when an item reaches a target price or discount level.
• Shoppers can authorize the chatbot to complete the purchase by checking an “Auto Buy” button and have 24 hours to cancel before the item ships, according to Modern Retail.
• The feature is currently available on the Amazon app to all US Prime members.

Zoom out: Amazon’s decision to bury the news under a series of Black Friday and Cyber Monday announcements seems unusual, given how robustly the retailer typically publicizes new genAI and agentic tools.

• The low-key announcement is a missed opportunity to demonstrate Amazon’s ability to fight off challengers like ChatGPT and Perplexity, whose growing influence in shopping decisions is threatening Amazon’s grip on ecommerce and its ad business.
• Amazon does have a significant advantage over its AI rivals: Shoppers are more than three times as likely to trust retailers’ AI tools to handle the entire shopping journey (25%) than AI platforms like ChatGPT (7%), according to a survey by Bain & Company.
• Amazon is moving fast to capitalize on that trust, rolling out tools like Help Me Decide and Buy for Me that both familiarize shoppers with the idea of relying on genAI for purchases and keep them locked within the retailer’s ecosystem.

Our take: Amazon’s “Auto Buy” feature could make Rufus more useful for deal-seeking shoppers this holiday season—provided they know the option exists and trust the chatbot’s accuracy.

Over the long term, adding more agentic features to Rufus—which has been used by 250 million active customers this year alone—could enable Amazon to satisfy shoppers’ desire for AI assistance without ceding ground to platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

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