Amazon Rufus: The AI Engine Powering $10 Billion in Sales
Amazon's Q3 earnings report provided some remarkable stats on the growth and ambition of Rufus. Amazon's AI shopping assistant is on track to generate $10 billion in incremental annual sales and attract nearly 250 million users globally. Monthly users of Amazon Rufus are up 140% year-over-year with interactions up 210% year-over-year. customers using Amazon Rufus during a shopping trip are 60% more likely to complete a purchase.
To ensure the growth continues, Amazon is aggressively defending its data and customer experience by blocking external AI bots from Meta, Google, Perplexity, and others, restricting their ability to crawl and scrape marketplace information. By limiting third-party AI access and issuing legal challenges to unauthorized agents, Amazon reinforces Rufus’s dominance and ensures control over its retail ecosystem.
Rufus signifies a strategic shift for Amazon toward answer-driven commerce, blending conversational search and natural language understanding to streamline the customer journey from awareness to purchase within seconds. Ongoing upgrades have enabled agentic shopping—where AI manages everything from product selection to checkout—making Rufus an indispensable tool for both buyers and brands.
Amazon ’s strategy signals that conversational commerce is not a fleeting experiment but a new industry norm. By controlling the data and investing in proprietary AI, Amazon positions Rufus as the central node in a closed-loop shopping environment, blocking competitors and shaping future retail experiences. The combination of rapid adoption, technological upgrades, and defensive data practices suggests Amazon’s approach has enduring longevity and sets the benchmark for AI-driven commerce. The big question is whether the new Agentic AI commerce platforms provided by Chat GPT and Perplexity among others can capture enough shopper traffic to put pressure on Amazon to change their strategy.
