Amazon Puts AI Agents to Work as Sales Top $200 Billion
On Amazon’s first-quarter earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy described agentic artificial intelligence as a work in progress. Well, progress has been made.
By the end of Q2, Amazon had AI agents helping people shop, organizing employees’ digital work, supporting contact centers and scanning software for security weaknesses.
The company’s earnings announcement Thursday (July 30) showed Alexa as one of the clearest examples. Amazon combined Rufus and Alexa+ in Alexa for Shopping, an agentic assistant that can recommend and compare products, provide price histories and automate purchases through price alerts and Auto-Buy. Active users nearly doubled during the quarter, according to the company, while interactions increased more than fivefold from a year earlier. U.S. customers who use Alexa for Shopping spend more than 40% more per order than those who don’t, Jassy said.
Amazon is also putting agents to work inside businesses. Jassy referred several times to Amazon Quick. It’s a new agent that can search email, calendars, files and company systems, then take actions such as scheduling meetings, sending messages, updating customer records and building dashboards. Amazon added autonomous agents that users can create in plain language to complete multistep assignments in the background.
The product grew out of Amazon employees’ own demands. Jassy said Quick initially helped workers summarize documents, conduct research and analyze business information. Employees then pushed the company to connect the tool with email, Slack and calendars.
“It’s pretty remarkable not only how fast it’s taken off inside Amazon, but how many external enterprises have put it into production with a very large number of people at their companies,” Jassy said.
That internal-to-external path helps explain Amazon’s broader AI strategy. The company builds tools to solve its own operational problems, then sells those capabilities to businesses through Amazon Web Services.
Jassy said Amazon sees “a very substantial opportunity” in building agentic applications for customers and AWS. Amazon Connect, its contact-center platform, is used by major airlines, banks and healthcare companies and continues to grow quickly.
The company has also added payments to Bedrock AgentCore, allowing agents to execute transactions autonomously.
Moving to Frontier Models
The first analyst question on the call turned to frontier AI, the most advanced class of artificial intelligence models. The analyst asked whether Amazon needed a leading model of its own even though Bedrock lets AWS customers choose among models from several providers. This week the company thinned the ranks of its AI models.
Jassy’s answer was direct: “There is not going to be one model to rule the world.”
Different models will move ahead at different times, he said, and companies building important AI applications will want access to multiple options. That puts the emphasis on Bedrock’s selection, price, security and governance rather than on Amazon owning the top model at any given moment.
Still, Amazon is developing its own frontier model. Jassy said doing so would give the company more control over costs for its consumer applications and help lower costs for AWS customers.
Bedrock’s momentum supports the multimodel strategy. Customers spent more on the service during Q2 than in all previous quarters combined. Amazon’s AI business and chip business each passed annual revenue run rates of $25 billion, with both growing at triple-digit percentages.
Three other businesses showed how Amazon is combining speed, selection and automation:
Grocery: Jassy said Amazon’s grocery business generated more than $150 billion in merchandise sales last year, making it the second-largest U.S. grocer. Monthly active customers buying perishables increased more than 50% since the beginning of the year. Same-day orders containing perishables average more than three times as many items as other orders.
Logistics: Amazon delivered more than 40% more items the same day or overnight during the first half than it did a year earlier. Its Amazon Now service, which promises delivery in 30 minutes or less, expanded to 80 additional U.S. cities and towns. Amazon also introduced Supply Chain Services so outside businesses can use its network to move, store and deliver goods.
Pharmacy: New Amazon Pharmacy customers more than doubled during the first six months while same-day prescription deliveries increased nearly fivefold. Automatic manufacturer discounts saved customers nearly $250 million in out-of-pocket costs, up more than 400% from a year earlier.
Amazon’s financial results showed the scale funding that expansion. Second-quarter sales rose 20% to $200.6 billion while operating income increased 43% to $27.5 billion. AWS sales climbed 37% to $42.2 billion, its fastest growth in 18 quarters, and AWS operating income reached $16.6 billion.
Net income rose to $62.6 billion, though that included $53.4 billion in pre-tax nonoperating income tied primarily to Amazon’s Anthropic investment. Free cash flow swung to a $7.6 billion outflow over the trailing 12 months as spending on property and equipment rose sharply, primarily to support AI.
