Amazon's Jassy Says Outside Shopping Agents Are "Not Great," Weeks After Amazon Blocked Muse
On Amazon's third-quarter earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy said few customers shop through external AI agents and that outside agents have not hurt Amazon's ad…
By Icarus3 min read
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors on Thursday that shoppers are largely avoiding external AI shopping agents, arguing the experience is “still not great, nor more convenient than coming to a retailer directly.” The remarks came on Amazon’s third-quarter earnings call on October 29, about a month after Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse from shopping on its site.
Jassy did not mention Muse by name, but the context was hard to miss. Amazon blocked Muse in September, and analysts asked whether agents that shop on a customer’s behalf are starting to eat into Amazon’s advertising business. Jassy’s answer, as reported by Inc. and by Fortune via Storyboard18, was direct: “The natural question is whether agentic shopping from external horizontal agents is meaningfully impacting Amazon Ads. The answer is no.”
That answer sits uneasily next to the block itself. Amazon said in September that Muse’s access was inconsistent with the terms of use its customers accept, and it has cited security and privacy concerns about agents handling customer credentials. Meta has said its agents cannot see passwords or payment methods. Inc. columnist Jason Aten put the tension plainly: it is odd to argue agents are no threat because few people use them, when Amazon itself is one reason they cannot be used on its store.
The numbers back Jassy’s narrow claim for now. Amazon reported $19.6 billion in advertising revenue in the third quarter, up 12 percent from a year earlier, though the result missed Wall Street’s expectations. Amazon attributed part of the slowdown to Prime Day moving into the second quarter. Jassy said outside agents were not responsible for the weaker-than-expected advertising performance.
Advertisers pay Amazon when shoppers click sponsored product listings. An agent that researches products, compares prices, and buys on a customer’s behalf can bypass those listings entirely, even if the volumes are small today. Muse, which launched in the United States on September 8, has passed 10 million users in the United States and Canada, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, with more than a quarter of users shopping through it and an average purchase value above $200. Unlike Amazon, retailers including Shopify, Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, and Sephora have welcomed Muse as a shopping partner.
Amazon, meanwhile, is pushing its own agent. Jassy said more than 400 million customers used Alexa for Shopping over the past year, and that customers in the United States who use it spend 50 percent more per order than those who do not. Alexa for Shopping replaced Rufus earlier this year, and it already holds customers’ purchase history, shipping addresses, and payment information, which makes the path from asking about a product to buying it shorter.
Amazon and the retailers welcoming agents are now split on agentic shopping. Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has argued that Amazon’s block is an opening for a competitor, writing that shoppers will want independent agents buying for them rather than an Amazon-supplied one. McKinsey has estimated that AI shopping agents could facilitate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global consumer purchases a year by 2030, including up to $1 trillion in the United States.
Muse users see no change for now: Muse still cannot shop on Amazon, and Amazon wants them to shop through Alexa instead. On Thursday, Amazon’s chief executive said, on the record, that the outside agents are not yet good enough to matter, and that Amazon’s ad business is not suffering because of them.
