Amazon.com Inc. today announced it’s rolling out a generative artificial intelligence assistant dubbed Project Amelia for independent sellers to provide answers, advice and tools to boost their productivity and sales.

The new AI assistant is currently in beta mode for select Amazon partners in the United States. It will allow sellers to ask questions in English and get guidance about how to efficiently manage their business.

“Project Amelia is an always-available, expert partner to sellers, learning their unique businesses so it can offer personalized insights and support, and available from any page within Seller Central, at any time,” Mary Beth Westmoreland, vice president of worldwide selling partner Experience at Amazon, said in the announcement.

Amazon said it built Amelia using Bedrock, the company’s managed platform that provides managed access to foundation models from Amazon Web Services and other large language model providers. Developers also gain access to AI tools to build and train models and scale AI applications. Using the platform, the company said it used deep expertise and specialized knowledge of selling on Amazon, giving it the unique ability to provide sellers with relevant responses to their needs.

Seller Central is a web-based dashboard that Amazon independent merchants use to manage their business stores. It’s a central hub for them to list and price products, create, update and set product information, manage inventory, fulfill orders, track performance and create promotions.

Using Amelia, sellers can ask questions such as “What are the top things I need to prepare for the holiday season?” The assistant will reply with personalized information about best practices related to inventory and best practices related to the particular merchant’s inventory and past customer sales metrics. That allows sellers to prepare product lineups for surges in interest, pick categories that were top sellers in previous seasons, and determine what kinds of promotions will work best to put them in front of the most shoppers.

Users can also ask Amelia to provide current sales data and traffic information to provide visibility with questions such as, “How is my business doing?” This will give a summary of sales, units sold and website traffic in an easy-to-read format. From there, sellers can ask follow-up questions to get a deeper understanding of how sales have been going for specific categories or products.

Amazon said the AI will soon be able to offer resolution for complex problems as well such as if there’s a logistics or reporting issue within the system. For example, sellers could tell the AI, “I have 500 units on the way but that’s not reflected in the system. Can I have someone look into this for me?”

The AI would then help guide sellers through the proper remediation channels, including connecting them with support. In the future, Amazon said, Amelia would be able to offer to resolve certain issues on sellers’ behalf.

“By streamlining sellers’ operational demands and burdens, Project Amelia will reduce the time and effort required by sellers to manage their business, which they can reinvest in their growth,” said Westmoreland.

Amelia is currently available in beta mode for an initial set of U.S. sellers and will progressively roll out to additional U.S. sellers in the coming weeks. The AI assistant is set to begin a phased expansion to additional countries later this year and will become available in languages other than English.

Image: Amazon