The online retail giant Amazon.com Inc. has taken another foray into generative artificial intelligence, launching a new tool that helps sellers to create listings for their products.

The new tool was announced today at Accelerate 2023, Amazon’s annual seller conference, after being tested among an initial group of buyers last month. It’s designed to help Amazon product sellers craft more compelling, detailed and accurate product descriptions.

For many sellers, the task of creating product titles, bullet points and descriptions is a challenge. Not everyone is naturally gifted at writing, and for someone who is selling hundreds of different items, doing so can be a monumental challenge.

That’s why Amazon has set out to eliminate this hurdle for sellers, allowing them to focus more on what they do best. In a blog post, the company said the new generative AI tool can help sellers to create comprehensive listings that are not only accurate but also engaging.

For sellers, the process is very straightforward. They provide a brief description or a few keywords of the product in question, and Amazon’s AI will do the rest, whipping up a detailed description for the seller to review. Assuming they are satisfied with it, they can add the content to their listing. Alternatively, they can edit the AI generated content to their liking.

Robert Tekiela, vice president of Amazon selection and catalog systems, explained that the company’s generative AI models are able to infer, improve and enrich product listings at an unprecedented scale, dramatically improving their quality, performance and efficiency. “Our models learn to infer product information through the diverse sources of information, latent knowledge and logical reasoning that they learn,” he said. “For example, they can infer a table is round if specifications list a diameter or infer the collar style of a shirt from its image.”

Amazon’s technology is powered by large language models, similar to those used by OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT. LLMs have come on in leaps and bounds this year, and hundreds of businesses have been scrambling to build new products and services based on them that can boost people’s productivity. Amazon’s product listings generator is a prime example of that.

This is the second major generative AI focused update for Amazon’s retail business. Earlier this year, it launched AI-powered review summaries that aim to help shoppers save time by providing a snapshot of a product’s best or worst features, as per previous buyers. But though that was aimed to helping buyers, the capabilities announced today are the first ones focused on the sellers’ side.

Besides its retail business, Amazon has been exploring generative AI’s capabilities in many other areas. Last year, for example, it integrated the technology with its Alexa assistant to tell bedtime stories to children.

According to Amazon, early feedback from sellers has been extremely positive, with most saying it has resulted in improved product listing quality and conversation rates. However, Amazon itself cautions that sellers should carefully review every AI-generated product listing to ensure it’s accurate.

Amazon has created a short video that shows its latest generative AI capabilities in action. The company added that this is just a taste of what’s to come, with plenty of additional AI tools for sellers in the pipeline.

Image: Amazon