Amazon has new ambitions for a huge online market. This uses the generated AI to execute the vision.
The company is already the largest e-commerce platform in the Western world, supporting millions of third-party merchants who sell millions of products themselves and offer even more items through the platform and its warehouse and logistics network.
However, it’s not enough for Amazon. Recently, the company has expanded its market in new ways. For example, this year, Amazon launched the “Buy For Me” feature, which recommends products from other branded websites and allows shoppers to purchase from within the Amazon app.
The internal planning document obtained by Business Insider sheds new light on how Amazon uses AI to support these efforts.
This document describes a project, which is a project that uses AI models to “compose” information from various data sources such as external websites and images, starting late 2024. Next, generate “global complete, correct, and consistent product information.”
The ultimate goal of the MultyEar project is to make Amazon the best source of product information for “all products in the world.”
More list, shorter time
Starfish are part of an effort to simplify the product listings of third-party sellers. Amazon began rolling out this element in 2023, helping merchants create stronger product descriptions from short inputs or individual URLs. We also introduced an AI tool that automatically generates product images and video ads.
“Starfish uses LLM to improve its catalogue of scale by enriching product data and filling out missing information, correcting errors, rewriting titles, bullet points, and product descriptions more relevant to customers,” the document explained.
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In recent years, the company has stepped up efforts to improve listing quality, removing billions of inactive or unsold products from the market, BI previously reported.
$7.5 billion boost
Generating more product listings and making them accurate and persuasive can potentially increase sales. This is important for Amazon’s e-commerce business to continue growing.
Manually creating lists takes time for sellers, so speeding up this process can be a win-win for Amazon and its merchants.
Amazon’s internal documents estimated in 2025 that Statrfish will donate $7.5 billion in additional total merchandise sales in 2025, thanks to better conversions and building a wider product selection.
GMS measures the total value of all items sold on the company’s e-commerce platform. While $7.5 billion has earned a lot of sales, Amazon generates hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue from its market operations.
Wideer ambition
In fact, internal documents show that the human rafish initiative has much broader ambitions. Turning Amazon’s marketplace into the top global source of all product information is the goal of leading the company to the truck as it could compete more with Google’s shopping services.
One day, starfish were able to scrutinise the global web and collect a mountain of data that would help AI systems automate product descriptions.
According to the internal planning document for the second half of 2024, the new AI tool was expected to collect product information from 200,000 external brand websites this year, with “mapping external items to Amazon catalogs.”
Many leading technicians and AI companies have bots that craze the internet to rub, collect and index data from websites. Mapping is the process of organizing and displaying extracted information. Amazon has its own crawler called Amazonbot.
The company said on its Amazonbot web page that the crawler is gathering information “to improve our services so that Alexa can answer questions for its customers more accurately.”
It is unclear whether this bot will work with the Starfish Project or whether the raw, frayed part of this initiative is still in work.
An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on this part of the project, but shared other details in BI in a statement.
The spokesman confirmed that Starfish maps data for certain features, including the new “Buy For Me” recommended system for external products.
“Amazon is continually leveraging generated AI to improve the customer and seller experience,” the spokesman added. “This feature improves product descriptions in the catalog for sellers and ultimately helps customers find the products they want and need.”
To measure starfish effectiveness, Amazon is running A/B tests, and internal documents show that it internally compares the sale of AI-enriched products with those that do not. Amazon also explained that it is building a new bulk list feature and plans to expand starfish to additional countries later this year.
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