- Amazon has launched generative AI for sellers in the UK and some EU markets, and more than 30,000 sellers are using these AI-enabled listing tools.
- Amazon’s introduction of generative AI into the European market will face regulatory issues over data privacy.
OUR TAKE
Amazon’s new generative AI capabilities for sellers are a different experiment, which puts higher demands on data definition and protection. Indeed, Amazon itself has been accused by EU regulators of misusing merchants’ non-public data, and just this month UK retailers filed a $1.4 billion lawsuit against the company over similar allegations.
–Zora Lin, BTW reporter
What happened
Amazon has launched a feature that allows sellers in the EU and the UK to benefit from generative AI when launching new products. These generative AI tools simplify the listing creation process, allowing sellers to provide a few descriptive words or upload a product image to generate compelling product titles, descriptions, and other details. Given the hallucinatory tendency of large language models, Amazon recommends that sellers thoroughly review copies to make sure everything is correct.
“We are actively working on powerful new features to make generated lists more efficient and make it easier for you to list products,” the company says at its UK forum. While it’s still a relatively new feature, more than 30,000 of Amazon’s EU sales partners already use one or more of its generative AI listing tools.
Also read: A deep dive into Amazon Web Services’ advanced features
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Why it’s important
Nine months ago, Amazon first announced plans to bring generative AI technology to sellers. Amazon hasn’t revealed the availability of the technology in individual markets, but according to an Amazon forum post, it’s been mostly limited to the U.S., so far, though, the company did quietly launch the tool in the U.K. earlier this month.
Amazon’s new generative AI model can greatly facilitate sellers’ operations and product information filling, allowing sellers to focus on other aspects of their business. Robert Tequila, Amazon’s vice president of selection and catalog systems, said, “With the new generative AI model, we can infer, improve, and enrich product knowledge at an unprecedented scale and make tremendous strides in quality, performance, and efficiency. Our models learn to infer product information by learning from various information sources, underlying knowledge, and logical reasoning.” For example, if the diameter is listed in the specification, they can infer that the table is round.
If Amazon can develop a large-scale generative AI European market, this will become a new economic growth point for Amazon. It is going to support Amazon’s European Expansion Accelerator (EEA) program, which helps sellers quickly expand their European site business for free, making it more attractive for merchants to join.
