Amazon Says Rufus Gives It an Edge in Agentic Commerce Race

Amazon’s first-quarter earnings call sounded less like a retail update than a briefing on the next phase of cloud computing. The overwhelming majority of the discussion centered on AWS, artificial intelligence infrastructure and the chips Amazon says are now becoming a major business of their own.

But beneath the talk of Trainium, Bedrock and data centers was a more revealing retail story: Amazon, like everyone else, is still trying to figure out what agentic AI will actually mean for shopping, advertising and the future of eCommerce.

CEO Andy Jassy made clear that Amazon sees AI agents as the next major interface between consumers and commerce. He called the opportunity in agentic commerce “very good for customers,” and said he expects it to be good for Amazon as well. The clearest expression of that strategy is Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, which Jassy said has improved substantially over the past year. Monthly active users for Rufus are up more than 115%, while engagement is up nearly 400% year over year.

The bigger issue is where shoppers will start when they want an AI agent to help them buy something. Jassy acknowledged that Amazon is talking with third-party horizontal agents, but he was blunt about their current limits. He compared the moment to the early days of search-engine referrals to eCommerce. Search got better over time, he said. Agentic commerce is not there yet.

Third-party agents, Jassy said, still have trouble getting “the pricing right or the product information right.” They also lack the personalization data and shopping history that Amazon has built over decades. That gap may be the core of Amazon’s strategy. The company does not need to win agentic commerce from scratch. It needs to turn its existing customer relationship into a better shopping agent than a general-purpose tool can offer.

Data Makes Rufus Run

That is Amazon’s opening. Jassy argued that shoppers may prefer to begin with an agent tied to a retailer they already use because that retailer has better data. Amazon knows what customers bought, what they viewed, what similar customers purchased, where they ship items and how their accounts are configured. That gives Rufus a practical advantage that a general-purpose agent may not have.

Jassy put the ambition plainly: Amazon wants Rufus to become “the best shopping assistant anywhere.” The comment captured Amazon’s broader view of agentic commerce. The company is not treating it as a separate channel. It is treating it as a new layer on top of the shopping experience it already controls.

The earnings materials showed how far Amazon is already pushing AI into the store. The company said Rufus can research products, track prices and automatically buy items in Amazon’s store when they reach a set price. Amazon also introduced sponsored products and brand prompts inside Rufus. Nearly 20% of shoppers who interact with a brand prompt in Rufus continue the conversation about that brand, according to the company.

That opens a different kind of advertising opportunity. In traditional search, a shopper types a query, scans a results page and clicks. In agentic shopping, the process may unfold through a conversation. Jassy said these experiences tend to be “multi-turn conversations,” with the customer narrowing the need as the agent asks and answers follow-up prompts. That creates more chances to surface relevant products, including sponsored recommendations.

The seller side is part of the same strategy. Amazon introduced a Seller Central experience that dynamically generates personalized visualizations of data, insights and scenarios based on a seller’s goals. Jassy said the early response and feedback have been strong. For Amazon, that kind of tool turns AI into a seller-service product. For sellers, it could make Amazon’s marketplace feel less like a dashboard and more like an operating system.

AWS Drives the Strategy

The broader AI strategy, however, still runs through AWS. Jassy said Amazon has “never seen a technology grow as rapidly as AI,” and he framed agents as one of the biggest reasons customers are choosing AWS. Bedrock, Amazon’s platform for building with AI models, saw customer spending grow 170% quarter over quarter and processed more tokens in the first quarter than in all prior years combined, according to the company.

Jassy also described a shift from simple AI responses to systems that remember context and take action. In the call, he said the future of agents is stateful, meaning they can store identity, remember prior interactions and use tools to complete tasks. That is central to Amazon’s pitch for Bedrock Managed Agents, which the company announced in preview. It is also central to why Amazon sees AI as a long-term driver of both cloud spending and commerce activity.

That is the connective tissue in Amazon’s earnings call. AWS is selling the infrastructure. Rufus is becoming the shopping interface. Seller Central is becoming more automated. Amazon Ads is preparing for conversational discovery. None of it suggests agentic commerce is fully formed. But it does show that Amazon is trying to own the parts of the stack that could matter most: data, compute, shopping intent, seller tools and advertising.

Three other parts of the call showed how Amazon is using its core operations to support that shift:

Delivery speed: Jassy said Amazon has delivered more than 1 billion items same day or overnight so far this year. The company also announced 1-hour and 3-hour delivery options on more than 90,000 items in the U.S., with 1-hour delivery available in hundreds of cities and towns and 3-hour delivery in more than 2,000.

Alexa: Alexa+ expanded to Mexico, the U.K., Italy and Spain. Jassy said customers using Alexa+ are talking to Alexa twice as much, completing purchases on devices three times more, streaming music 25% more and using smart-home functions 50% more than with Alexa.

Grocery: Amazon said it generated more than $150 billion in gross grocery sales in 2025, making it the second-largest grocer in the U.S. Jassy said perishable sales have grown more than 40 times year over year where same-day perishables are available, and those shoppers add nearly three times as many items to their orders and spend more than 80% more than customers who do not buy same-day perishables.

The financial results gave Amazon plenty of room to keep investing. Net sales rose 17% to $181.5 billion in the first quarter, while operating income increased to $23.9 billion from $18.4 billion a year earlier. AWS sales grew 28% to $37.6 billion, and AWS operating income reached $14.2 billion. Net income rose to $30.3 billion, or $2.78 per diluted share, including $16.8 billion in pre-tax gains tied to Anthropic investments. Free cash flow fell sharply to $1.2 billion for the trailing 12 months, driven largely by higher property and equipment spending tied to AI.