The company’s new suite of seller tools, anchored by a product called Seller Assistant, automates tasks ranging from product listing to demand forecasting and is designed to reduce the time sellers spend on routine operations.
The rollout comes as Amazon faces its sharpest competitive pressure in India to date, contending with e-commerce rivals Flipkart and Meesho, as well as quick-commerce players Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart, all racing to capture cost-sensitive shoppers in smaller cities. Last year’s Prime Day in India drew over 18,000 orders per minute, with 70 per cent more signups from Tier-II and Tier-III cities.
Amazon, which has poured nearly $40 billion into India since 2010 and pledged $35 billion more by 2030, is making a calculated bet that AI-powered decision support — not just cheaper warehouses or faster delivery — will be the defining edge in India’s next commerce cycle.
“Today, a small seller operating from a single room has access to the same intelligence that powers the world’s largest commerce operations,” Abhijit Kamra, director of seller experience for emerging markets at Amazon, told Business Standard. “We are not simply giving sellers new tools — we are building AI that works alongside them, helping them start, manage, and grow their businesses.”
Kamra said the AI push, which the company says aims to reach 15 million businesses by 2030, builds on a longstanding focus on small and medium enterprises. Early results show sellers using the AI-powered listing tools are spending 70 per cent less time on routine operational tasks, while listing quality and product discoverability have improved, he said.
The Seller Assistant suite covers the full arc of a seller’s journey. For catalogue creation, AI auto-generates product titles, descriptions, and attributes, and prefills up to 70 per cent of required listing fields from a single image or URL. On the inventory side, machine learning (ML)-powered restock recommendations are tailored to each seller’s catalogue and integrated with Amazon’s warehousing and last-mile logistics network for pan-Indian coverage. For advertising, the company’s Customised On-Demand Ads Experts programme connects sellers with AI-driven account diagnostics and personalised recommendations.
Amazon views the evolution of AI for sellers as a continuum: from access to data to insights and decision support and finally to agentic capabilities that act on a seller’s behalf. Kamra offered a concrete example: a Jaipur-based exporter receiving ML-backed insights on products likely to perform well in Germany. Once the seller chooses to enter that market, Amazon’s AI assists with store creation, product listings tailored to local language and preferences, and image adaptation for German shoppers.
The company evaluates seller outcomes on three metrics: ease of selling, lower cost of selling, and business growth — especially during major sales events.
India is among the first markets where the AI initiative has been deployed. Kamra said capabilities vary by country because models must be trained accordingly. In India specifically, factors including local languages; regional events such as Navratri and Pongal; the goods and services tax framework; and payment preferences such as the Unified Payments Interface all require local adaptation.
The company has also crossed $20 billion in cumulative exports from India and is targeting $80 billion by 2030. For Indian exporters, Kamra said AI is accelerating the process across the entire journey. Through Seller Assistant, merchants can identify which products are likely to succeed in specific overseas markets. For country-specific requirements — such as environmental compliance and value-added tax regulations in European markets — the system can analyse a seller’s catalogue, retrieve relevant information, and complete forms in an agentic manner, while keeping the seller as the final approver.
On concerns about seller dependency on large platforms, Kamra said Amazon’s success is tied to sellers’ success. The company’s goal, he said, is for AI to handle repetitive operational work so sellers can focus on strategy and innovation. A footwear seller, for instance, may use AI-generated insights to spot adjacent demand, such as socks, or discover appetite for leather shoes in Canada, but the decision to diversify or expand remains the seller’s own.
The AI capabilities were not available during last year’s Prime Day, Kamra said, making the 2026 edition the first real test of whether intelligent automation can translate into measurable gains for the hundreds of thousands of small businesses Amazon is counting on to grow with it.
