Amazon is big. Not just the forest, but the website too. Navigating the site can be a time-consuming mess, and some virtual vertigo can set in from information overload. The online retailing giant is using AI to help customers with something it calls Interests, an assistant that takes shoppers’ questions and requests, and helps them find and track certain products with greater ease than ever.

Amazon takes charge of your Interests

The boringly-named (yet fitting for Amazon) Interests can be accessed through the Amazon shopping app’s ‘Me’ tab. For users who already have access, “Your Interests” should be among the four buttons at the top of the tab. That should take users to the Interests page, where they can tap “Get started” to enter or dictate their prompts.

Interests can help customers’ shopping experience if, for instance, they want to keep track of new products, find a very specific range of products, or even generalised requests for users who don’t know enough about the item they’re researching.

The best thing about Interests is that it saves the prompts so customers can keep checking in on the progress of their product research. The AI assistant will automatically track newly available and relevant items, restocks, and even deals to give you suggestions based on your, well… interests. Customers can also update the prompt if they need to.

Hopefully, other giant retailers use AI to craft similar tools, because we can see these AI agents cutting a lot of time out of the online shopping experience. This could also be a boon to the technically illiterate, like the elderly. Though Amazon has officially announced Interests, the company seems to be following a slow rollout. We’re yet to see a substantial release here in South Africa, but people should start seeing the feature sooner rather than later.