Amazon leans on Rufus and Alexa to personalize Prime Day shopping

Amazon’s Prime Day push now runs through Alexa for Shopping, a May 13 launch that combines Rufus with Alexa+ for U.S. customers on the Amazon Shopping app, website and Echo Show devices. The pitch is obvious: shoppers can ask questions in the main search bar, build personalized shopping guides, compare products, see up to a year of price history and automate deal-finding, cart-building and routine purchases. The harder question is whether that AI is changing gift discovery or simply making it easier to verify that a discount is real.

For Amazon, the numbers point to both. The company says Rufus helped more than 300 million customers in 2025 research, compare and buy products, and says shoppers who use Rufus during a shopping journey are 60% more likely to complete a purchase. Prime Day 2025, which ran July 8 to 11, was Amazon’s biggest Prime Day ever, with record sales across more than 35 product categories. Amazon said customers saved billions and that the event was bigger than any previous four-day period that included Prime Day, underscoring how quickly the company has tied AI-assisted shopping to high-volume sale events.

The company had already been building the same stack before the Alexa rebrand. AI Shopping Guides arrived in October 2024 for more than 100 product types, and Interests lets customers type everyday-language prompts with price limits and preferences to surface relevant products. For personalized gifts, that matters because it moves the hunt away from a generic search bar and toward intent. A buyer looking for a milestone present can start with a recipient’s style, a budget and a use case, rather than wading through page after page of the cheapest options.

Amazon added a more literal personalization tool on June 8, when it introduced a merch-design feature inside Alexa for Shopping. Customers can describe an idea and generate custom designs for T-shirts, sweatshirts, tumblers, water bottles and other Merch on Demand products, with Amazon handling production and Prime-eligible delivery. Amazon Custom still offers personalized gifts, décor and products as a separate destination, but the new setup pushes customization closer to the main shopping flow. That makes Amazon’s AI feel less like a search helper and more like a gift-finding engine, even if plenty of shoppers will keep using it first to confirm that the sale price is worth believing.