Amazon Unveils AI Agent That Can Shop and Place Orders
Amazon launched an AI agent on Monday (March 31) that can use a web browser to do things like shop for products and services on behalf of users. It can even place the order for you.
Called Nova Act, the new artificial intelligence (AI) model can navigate, interact with and act on web content without constant human oversight. Basically, it can mimic what human users do when they use a web browser.
For example, it can search for products, add items to a cart, check out and pay for the order. It can also track specific products across eCommerce sites to compare prices and monitor for price discounts. It can do things like update a consumer’s billing information across retail websites as well.
Non-retail uses include submitting an out-of-office request, putting on a calendar hold and filing expense reports, among other tasks.
“We think of agents as systems that can complete tasks and act in a range of digital and physical environments on behalf of the user,” the company said in a blog post.
Amazon’s competitors have also introduced browser-using agents in recent months: Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.
Anthropic was the first to introduce such an agent, dubbed “computer use.” Introduced last October, the agent can look at a screen, move a cursor, click buttons and type text. Google followed with “Project Mariner” last December and OpenAI came next with “Operator” in January.
Read more: Amazon Launches Nova AI Models for Business
Nova Act Is DifferentBut Amazon said Nova Act differs from web-using agents of its competitors. It said AI agents that can perform multistep tasks for a complex goal — like planning a wedding — still need “constant” human supervision.
Amazon said Nova Act can be more autonomous. The answer lies in how it’s structured.
Nova Act lets developers break down complicated workflows into a series of single acts — such as do a search or check out. Developers can also add conditions to singular tasks, such as telling the agent not to accept the retailer’s upsell when it searches for a product.
By structuring Nova Act this way, Amazon said it is creating reliable building blocks for AI agents.
“If you have to babysit an automation, it’s not really an automation,” Vishal Vora, technical staff member at Amazon, said in a video. “That’s why reliability is the core of everything that we have built.”
For example, Vora demonstrated how he used Nova Act to order the same salad for dinner every Tuesday night.
The AI agent did the following:
- It went to the website of Sweetgreen, a popular fast-casual restaurant.
- It clicked on “delivery.”
- It searched for a particular salad Vora likes.
- It added the salad to the cart.
- It added a 20% tip.
- It clicked on “place order.”
The AI agent will do this every Tuesday to get Vora’s salad delivered. It did not have to be trained on the steps beforehand.
Nova Act is part of Amazon’s family of foundation models called Nova. Its software development kit (SDK) is accessible through nova.amazon.com for developers to use for experimentation and building.
“It is an exciting step forward for rapid exploration with AI, including bleeding-edge capabilities … for building agents that take actions on the web,” Rohit Prasad, senior vice president of Amazon artificial general intelligence (AGI), said in a blog post.
Amazon is doubling down on AGI. In February, it created a new artificial general intelligence research unit called Amazon AGI SF Lab. The San Francisco-based group aims to build “practical AI that can actually do things for us and make our customers more productive, empowered and fulfilled.”
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