Amazon is now bringing some of the artificial intelligence (AI) technology powering its new shopping agent to other retailers, starting with Kate Spade New York.

The latest offering, called Agentic Shopping Assistant, is now available through Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows retailers outside of Amazon to build and launch their own customized digital AI assistants. Amazon framed the tool as a way for retailers to gain a customized AI presence as more shoppers use AI agents to search for products, compare options and make purchases.

Among the first brands to adopt the technology is Kate Spade New York. Agentic Shopping Assistant on AWS serves as the basis for the brand’s new AI Gift Concierge. That agent can hold natural-language conversations and recommend gifts based on occasion, style and more.

“It’s a conversational AI experience that helps customers find the right gift, and it came directly from listening to our consumers and figuring out what they actually needed,” Fabio Luzzi, Tapestry’s chief data and analytics officer, told Digital Commerce 360 by email.

Amazon said more retailers are now testing the Agentic Shopping Assistant solution, though it did not name them.

Amazon ranks No. 1 in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 2000 Database. The database is how Digital Commerce 360 tracks the largest North American online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales.

Tapestry Inc., the parent company of Kate Spade and Coach, ranks No. 40 in the Top 2000.

Amazon is also No. 3 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces Database, which ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV).

How the Agentic Shopping Assistant works

Amazon said its new solution offers a technical foundation for retail customers to deploy their own conversational agents “in weeks.” Previously, it cited multiple “years it would take starting from scratch.”

Agentic Shopping Assistant was built on AWS services. These include:

• Amazon Bedrock, which supports generative AI applications.
• AgentCore, which helps operate AI agents.
• OpenSearch, which supports search and retrieval.

Amazon said the assistant was validated using “billions of real shopping interactions on Amazon.com.” It was inspired by insights the company gained from its own AI agent, Alexa for Shopping. Alexa for Shopping launched in May and combines its Rufus and Alexa+ offerings.

“As Amazon has continually iterated to create a leading AI shopping assistant, it gave us valuable insights about what capabilities, tools, and features matter most to the over 300 million customers who used it last year,” Amazon said.

To repackage the solution for retailers, the company combined starter code and architecture along with expert guidance. Developed in partnership with AWS’ Generative AI Innovation Center, Amazon said it serves as a foundation for retail customers to create their own AI chat agents. Each brand’s deployment can be customized to match their catalog, customer base, voice and shopping environment, Amazon said.

“Retailers get a technical foundation refined through years of powering AI shopping on Amazon.com, while keeping their competitive advantages from proprietary customer insights, domain knowledge, and brand relationships,” the company said.

How Kate Spade uses Amazon’s AI shopping tool

Following roughly 2.5 months of testing, Kate Spade launched its own conversational shopping experience on April 13.

Powered by Anthropic’s Haiku 4.5 model, the AI Gift Concierge is based on how people actually shop for gifts. Amazon said it was informed by the “questions customers asked Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping and the answers that drove successful outcomes.”

“We are excited about the possibilities agentic commerce can bring to our customers,” Yang Lu, Tapestry’s chief information and digital officer, shared in a statement. “AWS brought the recipe, but together we built the customization our consumers needed.”

Amazon described it as “the first production-ready retail AI assistant” built with Amazon’s AgentCore. In addition, the tool uses Amazon Bedrock to support “observability, authentication, and evaluations,” according to Amazon.

The result, the retailer said, is a conversational experience. It described the experience as one “that feels less like search and more like talking to someone who knows the brand and knows how to give a great gift.”

Amazon also framed AI Gift Concierge as a way to help alleviate the pressures of gift-buying, citing data showing that 53% of shoppers report experiencing stress during gift purchases.

How else Tapestry is using AI

Beyond its customer-facing shopping agent, Tapestry is also using AI inside its own business.

The luxury retailer recently secured a U.S. patent for Mira. That internal AI platform is designed to help employees make faster and smarter retail decisions.

Tapestry’s own data and analytics team designed Mira, tapping Amazon Bedrock as part of the deployment, Luzzi said. The company said the system pulls together data from across the business to surface related insights “in seconds to minutes.”

Employees are now using the platform to plan assortments, manage inventory and track consumer trends.

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