Amazon is bringing its innovative AI listing to more sellers, reveals today People in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom can now access tools designed to enhance product listings by creating product descriptions, titles, and associated details.
In addition, sellers can also “enrich” existing product listings by automatically adding missing information.
The announcement comes nine months after Amazon first revealed plans to bring its generative AI technology to sellers. The company hasn’t been overly forthcoming about its availability on a market-by-market basis, but it has presumably been largely limited to the US so far, though the company quietly launched the tools in the UK earlier this month. According to the Amazon forum mail. And in it Blog post Today, the company said it rolled out the feature in the UK and some EU markets “a few weeks ago,” with more than 30,000 of its sellers apparently using at least the AI-enabled listing tools in the intervening time frame.
Amazon is rolling out these new tools as a way to enable sellers to list merchandise more quickly. The seller heads to their List your products page as usual, where they can start by entering some relevant keywords that describe their product and simply press the “Create” button to craft the basis of a new listing. Seller can also create a listing by uploading an image via the product image tab.
Amazon will then edit the product title, bullet point, and description which can be left as is or edited by the seller. However, given the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to be hallucinatory, it would be unwise to publish a product listing without specifying it — a point Amazon acknowledges by recommending that the seller review the copy “thoroughly” to make sure everything is correct.
“Our generative AI tools are constantly learning and evolving,” the company said Announce In a UK forum a couple of weeks ago. “We are actively developing powerful new capabilities to make generated listings more effective, and make it easier for you to list products.”
Earlier this year, Amazon also launched a new tool that allows sellers to create product listings by posting a URL on their existing website. It’s not clear when or if Amazon will expand this functionality to Europe or other markets outside the US
Data question
While Amazon is no stranger to AI and machine learning across its vast e-commerce empire, bringing any form of AI to European markets raises some potential issues around regulation. There’s the GDPR in regards to data privacy for starters, not to mention the Digital Services Act (DSA) in regards to algorithmic risk, with Amazon’s online store designated as a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) for the purposes of ensuring transparency in the application of AI.
For context, Meta was forced last week to pause its plans to train its AI for public posts for European users following regulatory pressure. Amazon itself has faced the wrath of EU regulators in the past over its misuse of merchant data, when Amazon allegedly exploited non-public data from third-party sellers to benefit its competing business as a retailer. Just this month, UK retailers filed a £1.1 billion lawsuit against Amazon over similar accusations.
While Amazon’s latest foray into generative AI is a different proposition, it would have had to train its LLM students on some kind of data — what data, specifically, is not clear. In its beginning Announced last SeptemberAmazon shared a quote from the Vice President of Selection and Catalog Systems, Robert Tequilawhich referred to “various sources of information.”
With our new generative AI models, we can infer, improve and enrich product knowledge at an unprecedented scale and with significant improvement in quality, performance and efficiency. Our models learn to infer product information from the diverse information sources, underlying knowledge, and reasoning they learn. For example, they can infer that a table is round if the specifications indicate its diameter or infer the pattern of a shirt collar from its image.
Robert Tequila, vice president of selection and catalog systems at Amazon
TechCrunch has reached out to Amazon for comment on these various issues, and will update when — or if — we hear back.