Amazon Accelerate ran two days this year, and one theme carried through both of them. AI is now sitting inside product discovery, recommendations, and the daily decisions sellers make about their catalogs, not sitting off to the side as a feature to opt into later.

On the shopper side, Alexa for Shopping already has 350 million users, and Amazon says those shoppers spend 40% more per order than shoppers who skip it. Existing Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns are already showing up inside those AI-driven conversations, with no new setup required from the seller. If your campaigns are running today, they're already part of this, whether or not you've checked what Alexa is surfacing to the shopper you're paying to reach.

On the seller side, Amazon's Seller Assistant is now recommending what to stock, what to fix, and what to cut across a catalog. Opportunity Explorer will soon pitch product ideas directly to sellers instead of waiting for sellers to go looking for the next opportunity themselves. And the new 90 day launch plan lays out what content, inventory, and ad keywords to lead with before a seller spends a dollar on a new product, turning a process that used to take weeks of trial and error into a plan Amazon hands over up front.

Put together, these tools are shaping what gets built, what gets found, and what gets bought, and sellers are handing over more of that decision making than they used to. Seller Assistant's stock and cut recommendations and Opportunity Explorer's product pitches both work with less input from the seller than the tools they're replacing. That shifts the seller's job from making those calls directly to making sure Amazon has the right information to make them well.

That starts with the same catalog hygiene that's always mattered, accurate attributes, current inventory data, and detail pages that answer the questions Amazon's AI and a shopper's AI are both reading for. The brands getting the most out of Seller Assistant and Opportunity Explorer right now are the ones whose underlying data was already clean before these tools launched, not the ones scrambling to fix it after the fact once a recommendation shows up based on bad information.

It's also worth watching what Opportunity Explorer pitches once it rolls out more broadly. A tool that's suggesting new products based on marketplace gaps is only as good as the data it's reading, and a brand that understands its own margins and operational capacity will know which pitched opportunities are worth chasing and which ones look good on paper but don't fit the business.

We're already working through what this shift means for the brands we manage, and we're glad to talk through what it looks like for your catalog too.