Amazon's AI shopping assistant started as a helpful chatbot that could answer product questions. It is now something considerably more powerful — and considerably more controversial.
Rufus, which Amazon launched in February 2024 and has since expanded to eight countries, generated $12 billion in incremental annualized sales in 2025, according to the company's Q4 earnings materials. Over 250 million customers used it last year, with monthly active users growing 140% year-over-year. Customers who engage with Rufus are 60% more likely to complete a purchase.
Those numbers alone would make Rufus one of the most successful AI product launches in retail history. But it's what Amazon has done since — turning Rufus from a recommendation engine into an autonomous purchasing agent — that has the industry paying attention, and small retailers sounding alarms.
Auto-Buy: Your AI Buys While You Sleep
The auto-buy feature, which rolled out quietly during Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2025, lets Prime members tell Rufus to purchase items when prices hit a specified target. Tell it "Buy these headphones when they're 30% off," and Rufus checks prices every 30 minutes, executing the purchase automatically when conditions are met.
The system uses your default payment method and shipping address, sends a notification after purchase, and gives you 24 hours to cancel before shipment. Auto-buy requests stay active for six months.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has framed this as the future: "We're very excited about, in the long term, the prospect of agentic commerce," he told analysts. The pitch to consumers is compelling — why monitor prices yourself when an AI can do it for you? Amazon says customers using auto-buy are saving an average of 20% per purchase.
But the feature also subtly shifts the buying decision away from the consumer and toward the algorithm. As Will Haire, CEO of Amazon consultancy BellaVix, told Modern Retail: "It feels a bit like handing the casino your credit card."
Buy for Me: Shopping Beyond Amazon's Walls
If auto-buy keeps customers inside Amazon's marketplace, "Buy for Me" extends Amazon's reach far beyond it. The feature, launched in early 2025, lets Rufus purchase products from third-party retailer websites on the customer's behalf, using their Amazon payment and shipping details. Over half a million products from external merchants are now available through the system.
The problem? Many of those merchants never asked to participate.
SiliconANGLE reported that over 180 small businesses contacted Bobo Design Studio CEO Angie Chua after discovering their products listed without permission. "We were forced to be dropshippers on a platform that we have made a conscious decision not to be part of," Chua said. Emi Moon of digital art brand Peachie Kei was more direct: "There's a level of autonomy and consent that's being violated."
Merchants reported receiving orders for discontinued items, discovering inaccurate product descriptions generated by Amazon's AI, and finding their entire catalogs scraped and listed without notification. Amazon says merchants can opt out by emailing branddirect@amazon.com — but the default is opt-in, which means your products are on Amazon's system unless you actively object.
The Agentic Commerce Land Grab
Rufus's evolution from chatbot to purchasing agent is the most concrete example yet of what the industry has been calling "agentic commerce" — the shift from AI that recommends products to AI that actually buys them.
The concept was a dominant theme at Shoptalk 2026 last week, where Google, OpenAI, and Shopify all showcased their own visions for AI-driven purchasing. Gap announced checkout inside Google Gemini. Walmart expanded its ChatGPT integration. Shopify opened its merchants to ChatGPT's shopping experience.
But Amazon has a structural advantage none of those players can match: it already has the payment credentials, shipping addresses, and purchase history of hundreds of millions of consumers. Rufus doesn't need to convince shoppers to hand over their credit card to a new platform. It already has the card on file.
That's what makes Rufus different from every other AI shopping experiment. It's not asking for permission to become your purchasing agent — it's already positioned as one. The question is whether consumers embrace the convenience, whether regulators take notice of the consent issues, and whether the small retailers caught in the crossfire have any real leverage to push back.
For now, the numbers suggest Amazon is winning the argument. Twelve billion dollars in incremental sales buys a lot of patience — from investors, from consumers, and apparently from the AI agents doing the shopping.
Nova Analytics, PYMNTS, and About Amazon contributed reporting.