Amazon Debuts AI-Powered Tools for Business Clients

Amazon is introducing a series of AI-powered solutions to help business clients.

These new offerings, announced Wednesday (Nov. 11), include the new Amazon Business Assistant which is available to Amazon Business at no added cost.

“The assistant combines Amazon’s deep understanding of purchasing with smart conversational support to provide organizations with instant, interactive, and easy-to-follow recommendations on using and configuring an Amazon Business account,” the release said.

In addition, the assistant recommends ways to buy more efficiently based on purchase history and will continue to learn as time goes on through user interactions and feedback ratings. Users can find the Amazon Business Assistant by clicking on the orange icon at the bottom right corner of their Amazon Business account page.

“When an opportunity is identified to make purchasing easier or more efficient, the tool appears on the account page and provides support based on account settings,” the release added.

In the weeks ahead, U.S. Business Prime members will also gain access to Savings Insights, a new Amazon Business Analytics feature designed to reduce time spent uncovering buying trends and discovering savings, the release added.

Beyond that, the company said, Amazon Business and Amazon Web Services (AWS), in partnership with Deloitte, are rolling out a pair of new solutions designed to optimize industrial business buying and sourcing operations.

PYMNTS has written extensively about the way small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are embracing artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools to compete with their larger counterparts.

“Today, solo founders, accountants and operations managers are turning to AI to automate key back-office functions,” a report from June said. “From invoice generation and bill reminders to recurring billing and AI-assisted tax calculators, SMBs are using technology once reserved for large corporations.”

Among these business owners is Greg Schwartz, founder of Household.tv, a boutique marketing agency in Manhattan. Tired of manually creating invoices and hunting down payments, Schwartz used an AI-coding tool to write a script that integrates with Household’s back office and automates invoice generation for each project the agency takes on.

“It used to take me hours every week to generate invoices and follow up with clients,” Schwartz told PYMNTS. “The natural language interface of these tools transformed what used to be a serious engineering lift, or a third-party tool with limited customization, to a fully customized and automated part of my business. And on top of it, it’s helped with cash flow.”