There’s an interesting snippet in Amazon’s Q3 2025 Earnings Call regarding the future of AI shopping. It’s Amazon Rufus, which is on track to delivery billions of dollars in incremental sales. AI shopping is already a reality and Amazon are excited as hell about it.
I’ve got to be honest, I’ve tried Rufus and I’m not that good with it – frankly Alexa on my Amazon Echo seems to work better. Maybe this is just me, but Rufus is ok for very basic searches to save time typing a query in, but for longer more complex queries it’s just not cutting it. At least not yet, that might change significantly as Amazon develop it further.
But I’m not that important – what matters is what consumers are large are doing and Amazon have revealed that their AI-powered shopping assistant (named Rufus after the first dog to spend work days with their owner at Amazon), has had 250 million active customers this year.
Monthly users of Amazon Rufus are up 140% year-over-year with interactions up 210% year-over-year.
What’s more impressive is that customers using Amazon Rufus during a shopping trip are 60% more likely to complete a purchase and Rufus is on track to deliver over $10 billion in incremental annualized sales.
These £10 billion in incremental sales take into account a 7-day rolling attribution, during which Amazon counts a sale as being down to Rufus if a consumer started there.
It’s worth noting that Amazon has pulled up the AI drawbridge, withdrawing Google Ads which means they have a ton of control over where their products appear. That also piles on the pressure to further develop their own AI bots, like Rufus and Alexa, to ensure the Amazon selling machine carries on capturing consumer’s spend.
Back to me, ever since I had Prime I’ve been hooked and, regardless of whether I’m typing a search query in or using Amazon Rufus or Alexa, I’m conscious that everything is free delivery with Prime and that is hard for other retailers to compete with.
