Amazon's Project Amelia: 5 Things Sellers Should Know

Have you ever had trouble finding the answer to a particular question in Seller Central? Or wished you could get an easy answer to questions about sales trends or marketing tactics?

Amazon is betting that a lot of sellers have. Like many businesses, it's exploring ways generative AI can be helpful to customers and vendors. One area where it sees potential is using AI to help sellers find the information they need faster. That's the goal behind Amazon's Project Amelia.

What is Amazon's Project Amelia?

Project Amelia is Amazon's generative AI "selling expert" that can provide sellers with fast answers to a broad range of questions. According to Amazon, the tool was built on a combination of specialized information about selling on Amazon and the broader knowledge other generative AI tools are trained on. With that basis, it can offer answers about how to use the platform's selling tools, as well as more general questions like how to build the right products to appeal to customers, predict sales trends, and choose the most effective advertising tactics to try.

Project Amelia will be accessible at all hours of the day and can provide information quickly, meaning you don't have to wait until an Amazon staff member is available to help with something. It can provide a mix of personalized information specific to your Amazon account, and more general advice about running a successful eCommerce business on Amazon.

5 Fast Facts about Amazon's Project Amelia

Project Amelia is still new, having just launched to a subset of sellers in September 2024, with plans to roll out to more US sellers in the coming weeks. Some of the main things we know about it at this stage are:

1. It's built on Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon Bedrock is Amazon's service for building generative AI products. It's available to developers via the AWS (Amazon Web Services) side of the business. Amazon has been investing in machine learning and AI for years, so using its technology to build a personal AI assistant for sellers just makes sense.

2. It's designed specifically for Amazon sellers.

While Amazon is building generative AI products for different purposes, Project Amelia was built specifically to be a resource for third-party sellers on the platform. That helps ensure the answers you get will be relevant to your particular needs as an Amazon seller.

3. It's trained on specialized knowledge about selling on Amazon.

While Project Amelia is partially trained on the same kind of broad information other generative AI tools are, what sets it apart is that it was also trained on more specialized information about how selling on Amazon works. That means you won't just get generalized advice, you'll get specific information about using the Amazon platform and the kind of tactics that work best on Amazon.

4. It provides fast access to personalized metrics and reports.

In addition to answering more general questions about best practices, you can use Project Amelia to get personalized information about your seller metrics. Being able to ask Amelia a direct question to learn about things like conversion rates and return numbers could potentially save you time while helping you stay more on top of your metrics. Once Amelia answers your first question, you can prompt it with follow-up questions to dig down into any numbers you want more detail on.

5. Project Amelia will soon offer support and issue resolution.

For sellers that have access to the tool right now, the main focus of Project Amelia is offering personalized information on metrics or more general advice and information of the sort you might find on Seller Central. However, Amazon hopes to expand the tool's functionality over time so that you can also use it to resolve issues. When you face a problem that would usually involve needing help from an Amazon support agent, the hope is that Amelia can help you instead, leading to faster response times regardless of the time of day.

Amazon is Going All In on Generative AI

Project Amelia is one of several ways Amazon is embracing generative AI to help improve the seller experience. You can also use generative AI features to:

• Simplify writing product descriptions
• Improve inventory management via predictive insights
• Employ more personalized marketing

Project Amelia is just one tool in the larger generative AI toolkit that Amazon is building out.

Sellers can make use of these features to simplify some aspects of selling on Amazon. But with some of these features, you'll want to be careful how you use them. While generative AI technology has been around for a little while now, it's still essentially in its infancy and known for occasional inaccuracies. Don't shy away from using it, but double-check the information it provides any time the stakes are high. When making an important business decision, pair the information you get from Amelia with your own research and intuition. It will be more helpful if you treat it as a support tool than a source of wisdom.