Amazon launched a new AI-powered personal assistant for third-party vendors Thursday, one of many new features the company rolled out for its independent sellers this week.

The assistant, internally called Project Amelia, answers questions for sellers, offers advice and, down the line, will diagnose problems and take action.

Amazon has already integrated generative artificial intelligence into some services for sellers, like the ability to use AI to write suggested product listings, and has launched other AI-powered tools, including the shopping assistant Rufus and the chatbot Q. It is also reportedly working on an upgrade to its personal voice assistant Alexa, using AI to power a new, paid subscription service.

Project Amelia will run on Amazon Bedrock, an Amazon Web Services offering that provides different foundational learning models for companies, including Amazon itself, to build and scale AI-powered applications.

Amazon has been working on Project Amelia for more than a year, Dharmesh Mehta, vice president for selling partner services, said in an interview Wednesday with The Seattle Times. The project got its name because it was housed in the company’s Amelia building in South Lake Union. That building was named in honor of Amelia Earhart.

In its beta version, launched Thursday, Project Amelia is able to answer questions about a seller’s inventory, sales and customer traffic, as well as offer advice about how to launch a new product or prepare for the upcoming holiday season. It may recommend that a seller add more keywords to a product listing or promote festive items before the holiday.

It may also prompt a seller to try Amazon’s other services, like Fulfillment by Amazon, a service that third-party sellers can sign up for to use Amazon’s fulfillment network to ship orders.

Right now, Project Amelia looks and acts like other chatbots on the internet—a user types a question in a text box at the bottom of the screen and sends it over to Amelia, which takes its time thinking about the response and then generates a few lines of information. The bot then suggests follow-up questions the user may want to ask next.

But, Mehta imagines an iteration of Project Amelia that doesn’t require as much back and forth. He hopes the assistant could one day offer to take action for the seller. Rather than talking with a seller about the upcoming holidays, he pictures Project Amelia one day offering to set up a 20% discount on festive T-shirts before the holidays.

“We’re leveraging generative AI throughout the shopping experience, and if we can create a better shopping experience, then customers love the products, they come more often, that’s all good for sellers,” Mehta said.

“We’ll keep innovating on the shopping experience [and] if I think about every part of the selling experience, we can continue to reinvent some of those or transform them with generative AI,” he continued.

Mehta compared Project Amelia’s beta version to a concierge service. The assistant takes in all sorts of user questions and then works behind the scenes to find an answer.

Sometimes the concierge has to call in a plumber or an electrician to make the fix, but the user doesn’t have to know that. In the AI world, the plumbers and electricians are other data models trained to be subject-matter experts on all sorts of topics.

In the last three months, Amazon has seen a surge in interest in its AI tools that help sellers write product listings, Mehta said. After launching last year, the company has continued to refine the capabilities and, as more sellers use them, the AI gets smarter, he said.

At first, sellers had to input keywords. Then, they could add images or send a URL. Soon, Mehta said, sellers can upload a product catalog and the tool will do the rest. And, Amazon plans to launch a new feature that will use AI to generate advertising videos for sellers.

This week, at Amazon’s annual conference for third-party sellers, Amazon announced a range of other new services—like new capabilities to ship products from overseas, a new app for those sellers who use Amazon Shipping and a new offering to automatically replenish products for third-party sellers when inventory runs low.

Amazon also announced new partnerships with three other major players in the e-commerce space: Google, TikTok and PayPal.

Third-party sellers who use Buy With Prime—a way for customers to shop using Amazon Prime on third-party websites—can now display the Prime check mark and estimated delivery speeds on TikTok and Google’s shopping platforms.

On PayPal, merchants can now offer Prime as a delivery option for shoppers.

2024 The Seattle Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Americans who say they expect to “never retire” are more likely than others to score low on a measure of financial knowledge, a new study shows.

In a national survey, 20% of those who missed all three financial knowledge questions said they expected they would never retire, compared to 12% who answered all questions correctly, who said they’d likely work well past retirement age.

The study also found that those who were overconfident in their financial knowledge (and those whose low levels of confidence reflected their knowledge) were more likely to say they would never retire.

The findings, combined with other research, suggest that many people who say they will never retire aren’t saying that because they love their jobs and want to continue working indefinitely, said Sherman Hanna, co-author of the study and professor of consumer sciences at The Ohio State University.

“If you’re not knowledgeable about finances, it suggests that you don’t know what your financial situation is, and you may have no idea when you can retire,” Hanna said.

“Saying they’re never going to retire may be for some people a way of saying they have failed to prepare for retirement.”

The study was published recently in the journal Financial Services Review.

The findings have important implications for the way experts evaluate how many Americans are adequately prepared for retirement.

Many analyses of the projected retirement adequacy of American workers assume that those saying they will never retire will end up retiring at about age 70. But in a previous study, Hanna and his colleagues found that many of these “never retire” workers will actually drop out of the workforce at a much younger age—suggesting they might stop earning a steady income before they’ve done enough to shore up their finances.

“It means our projections of the proportion of workers on track for an adequate retirement might be too optimistic,” Hanna said. “Many of those who say they will never retire may not know enough about their finances and are not working toward a financially successful retirement.”

The researchers used data from the 2016 and 2019 Surveys of Consumer Confidence, sponsored by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board. Their final sample included 4,607 households in which the head of the household was aged 35 to 60 and was working full time.

The three questions in the SCF that measured financial knowledge—called the “Big Three” by researchers—relate to compound interest, real rates of return and risk diversification.

Findings in this study found that the more questions participants got wrong, the more likely they were to say they expected to never retire.

The survey also asked participants to rate their own financial knowledge on a scale from 0 (no knowledge) to 10 (high knowledge).

Of those who said they weren’t financially knowledgeable (levels 0, 1 or 2), 30% expected to never retire, more than twice the 14% of those who believed they were very knowledgeable (levels 9 and 10).

The researchers also rated the financial confidence of participants—and whether they were overconfident or underconfident—by comparing their subjective ratings of their financial knowledge with their actual scores on the financial knowledge questions.

Results showed that 17% of those who were overconfident in their financial knowledge expected to never retire, higher than the 12% who had appropriately high confidence in their financial knowledge.

The findings suggest that financial planners, counselors and educators need to have a clear understanding of what it means when people say they expect to never retire, Hanna said.

“We need to evaluate those who don’t expect to retire to ensure they have the appropriate level of financial knowledge and confidence to help them make plans for their post-working life,” he said.

Other co-authors of the study were Zezhong Zhang and Lei Xu, both doctoral students at Ohio State.