Amazon announced that its AI-powered shopping chatbot Rufus would be a solution for people overwhelmed by the overwhelming variety of products on its website. But, since this is Amazon, that will now include some ads, such as Advertising week First noticed, Rufus (named after a pet corgi kept by early Amazon employees) uses artificial intelligence to research products and recommend purchases through conversations.
“To help customers discover more products on Amazon’s AI-powered generative shopping assistant, known as Rufus, your ads may appear on placements related to Rufus,” the update for advertisers explains. “Rufus may generate complementary text based on the context of the conversation.”
Rufus generates results based on Amazon's vast product catalog, customer reviews, and community Q&A. In some ways, advertising is just another category of information. The update brings it closer to how Amazon's standard shopping search works. Instead of “sponsored” product suggestions as links on the page, Rufus will directly highlight advertised products as you answer your questions.
Obviously, Amazon doesn't want to bombard Rufus users with unrelated ads, hence the reference to “context.” So when you ask Rufus to compare different products or ask for gift ideas, you won't get meaningless suggestions. It's just that anything an advertiser has paid to sponsor will likely join the comparison or be included at the top of the collection of gift ideas.
Rufus is still technically an experiment, and Amazon has warned that its responses could be inaccurate. It's not clear what that might mean for sponsored products, but presumably Amazon doesn't want hallucinations to spoil the ads it serves its customers.
Advertising men with artificial intelligence
Rufus isn’t the first to start mixing ads with its AI. Microsoft began testing advertising through its Copilot AI chatbot a year ago. And conversational AI search engine Perplexity has started including sponsored suggestions in its search results in a way that more closely resembles Google’s business model.
But Amazon is the king of e-commerce, and other platforms are likely watching closely. If Rufus ends up being a real boon for businesses advertising on Amazon, you can be sure that imitators will soon pop up on other sites, if they haven't already. Ads may just be a revenue generator for Amazon, but Rufus could be the next iteration of online advertising.
