Amazon packages AI gift concierge for retailers to customize brands

Amazon is selling its gift-finding brain to other retailers, and that is the real story for brands that live or die on discovery. The new Agentic Shopping Assistant on AWS lets merchants build their own conversational shopping tools in as little as 60 days, with Kate Spade already live and additional retailers in testing.

The pitch is not a generic chatbot. Amazon says the package includes the architecture, starter code and expert guidance behind Alexa for Shopping, then lets retailers tune the experience to their own data, business rules, brand voice, customer base and catalog. For gift businesses, that matters because the hardest part of the sale is often not checkout, it is narrowing 200 possible choices to the one candle, tote, charm bracelet or party-ready set that feels right.

Amazon is leaning on scale to make the case. The company says its AI shopping assistant reached more than 300 million customers last year, drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales and converted conversational shopping sessions at 3.5 times the rate of traditional keyword search. Those are the kind of numbers that turn personalization from a nice-to-have into a line item retailers will fight to own.

Kate Spade is the first retail example Amazon is pointing to. Tapestry launched the brand’s AI Gift Concierge on April 13, 2026 on KateSpade.com, calling it the first production-ready retail AI assistant built with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. The assistant uses Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5 through Amazon Bedrock, and it walks shoppers through occasion, recipient and style before serving up curated product recommendations. Yang Lu, Tapestry’s chief information and digital officer, put it plainly at launch: “AWS provided the recipe, but the company built the customization its consumers needed.”

That is the commercial bet here. Amazon is licensing the technology through AWS, not through the consumer storefront that already competes with its retail partners, which may make the offer easier for brands to swallow. But the real test is whether branded assistants can do more than automate the obvious. If they help shoppers decide faster, surface better add-ons and keep the brand voice intact, they could become a serious new layer in gift discovery, not just another AI feature tacked onto a product page.

This is where personalized shopping gets practical: less browsing fatigue, more relevant recommendations, and a retailer-controlled voice at the exact moment a buyer is deciding what to give.