Amazon has pitched its shopping AI chatbot Rufus as a solution for people overwhelmed by the dizzying array of products on its site. But this being Amazon, that will now include some ads, like Advertising week First noticedRufus (named after the pet corgi of early Amazon employees) uses AI to research products and recommend purchases through conversations.
“To help customers discover more products on Amazon’s generative AI-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, your ads may appear in Rufus-related placements,” the update for advertisers explains. “Rufus can generate accompanying text based on the context of the conversation.”
Rufus generates results based on Amazon’s extensive product catalog, customer reviews, and community Q&As. In some ways, the advertising is just another category of information. The update brings it closer to how standard Amazon shopping search works. Instead of “sponsored” product suggestions as links on the page, Rufus will highlight advertised products directly as it answers your questions.
Amazon obviously doesn’t want to spam Rufus users with unrelated ads, hence the reference to “context.” So if you ask Rufus to compare different products or ask for gift ideas, you won’t get any nonsense suggestions. It’s just that anything an advertiser has paid to sponsor will likely be thrown into the comparison or included early in the pool of gift ideas.
Rufus is still technically an experiment, and Amazon has warned that his responses may be inaccurate. What that might mean for sponsored products is unclear, but presumably Amazon doesn’t want hallucinations to ruin the ads it serves to its customers.
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Rufus isn’t the first to mix ads with its AI. Microsoft began testing ads via its Copilot AI chatbot a year ago. And conversational AI search engine Perplexity has begun incorporating sponsored suggestions into its search results in a move that more closely resembles Google’s business model.
But Amazon is the king of e-commerce, and other platforms will likely be watching closely. If Rufus proves to be a real boon for businesses that advertise on Amazon, you can bet that imitators will quickly roll out elsewhere if they haven’t already. The ads may only be a revenue generator for Amazon, but Rufus could be the next iteration of online advertising.