Amazon’s next artificial intelligence push for merchants is less about giving sellers better answers than reducing how often they need to ask questions at all.

Mary Beth Westmoreland, vice president, Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, at Amazon, told PYMNTS in an exclusive conversation Wednesday (Sept. 23) that the company is expanding its Seller Assistant from a conversational tool into something closer to an operating layer for third-party merchants.

“We’ve gone from a smaller set of capabilities to onboarding just hundreds of them,” Westmoreland said.

Seller Assistant “doesn’t just answer questions” but can reason across inventory, pricing, advertising, demand and compliance; remember how an individual merchant operates; continuously monitor the business; and, with permission, take action, she added.

For Amazon’s millions of third-party sellers, that could turn AI from another tool they use into the infrastructure through which they run their businesses.

For years, selling software has largely assumed that humans would move among dashboards, interpret signals and decide what to do next.

Amazon is challenging that architecture. Once an AI system understands not only what is happening in a business but how its owner typically responds, it begins accumulating something closer to operational knowledge.

In an example given by Westmoreland, a fictional homewares seller asks how to prepare for the fourth quarter. The AI identifies demand for a planter and recommends changes to its description, keywords, pricing and promotions. Behind that relatively simple interaction, the system is evaluating current demand, historical product performance and broader category conditions.

The seller can then examine different scenarios through a dynamically generated visual interface and decide whether to authorize the changes.

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