Amazon to add ChatGPT-like search, joining Google and Microsoft in generative AI race
- A recent job posting says the e-commerce giant is ‘reimagining Amazon Search with an interactive conversational experience’
- Amazon says it is investing in generative AI across all its businesses, but has not commented on specific plans
“We’re looking for the best and brightest across Amazon to help us realise and deliver this vision to our customers right away,” the company said in the listing, which was posted on its jobs board last month. “This will be a once in a generation transformation for Search.”
Another posted job would be part of “a new AI-first initiative to re-architect and reinvent the way we do search through the use of extremely large scale next-generation deep learning techniques”.
Amazon spokesperson Keri Bertolino declined to comment on the job listings. “We are significantly investing in generative AI across all of our businesses,” she said in an email.
Conversational product search has the potential to reshape a key element of Amazon’s core retail business. The search bar at the top of the app and homepage in recent years have become the default gateway for millions of shoppers seeking to find a specific product. More than half of US shoppers say they start product searches on Amazon, a higher share than Google, according a survey conducted earlier this year by Jungle Scout, a maker of software for sellers on Amazon.
Early deployments of generative AI by Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google and others have been beset by errors in response to basic questions. But they also show how a beefed-up Microsoft Bing or Google search could offer users a more valuable way to find products.