Amazon (AMZN) stock is rallying back to record highs today after publishing its third-quarter earnings report. That’s mostly because AI is boosting its cloud business, but the tech giant also detailed its approach to AI-driven shopping amid a recent e-commerce push from ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy told analysts on a conference call late Thursday that the company’s Rufus AI chatbot has interacted with 250 million customers this year and helped deliver $10 billion in annualized sales. That’s less than 1% of the estimated annual sales for Amazon’s retail operations. But Jassy expects AI will continue to drive more sales by helping people find what they want.

Amazon has been focused on launching its own AI offerings. The company last week debuted its latest AI-powered feature called Help Me Decide, which offers a best pick for customers when they have been browsing similar products. But Jassy didn’t rule out future partnerships.

“We’re also having conversations with and expect over time to partner with third-party agents,” Jassy said. “And I think that it reminds me in some ways of the beginning of search engines many years ago being sources of discovery for commerce. And you had to kind of figure out the right way to work together.”

OpenAI recently rolled out a feature allowing users to make purchases from e-commerce providers directly within its hugely popular ChatGPT bot. Walmart (WMT) said earlier this month that it would partner with OpenAI to sell items from its e-commerce catalog directly through ChatGPT. Walmart stock jumped 5% following the announcement.

Walmart’s move prompted debate on Wall Street about whether Amazon would follow its retail rival’s lead and work directly with ChatGPT.

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Ultimately, Jassy said the company is focused on finding ways to improve the experience when third-party chatbots refer users to Amazon. He said third-party AI agents are a “very small” subset of referrals Amazon gets from search engines.

“Right now, I would say the customer experience is not good, there’s no personalization,” Jassy said. “There’s no shopping history. The delivery estimates are frequently wrong. The prices are often wrong. So, we’ve got to find a
way to make the customer experience better and have the right exchange value.”

The commentary caught the attention of some analysts.

“There was also a lot of color on agentic commerce growing the TAM (total addressable market) for e-commerce, and, more intriguing, the potential for Amazon to forge partnerships with third-party agents,” New Street Research analyst Dan Salmon wrote in a client note Friday. “While no names were named, a deal with OpenAI would be a significant catalyst for shares.”

William Blair analysts said Jassy’s remarks pushed back on a narrative among investors that agentic commerce could be a threat to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance.

“Alexa, and the existing consumer touch points it allows, provides a key platform to more creatively participate in agentic commerce, while the company also alluded to being in conversations with third-party platforms where we think it can ultimately strike deals that are altogether more favorable to the platform than early movers,” wrote William Blair analysts Dylan Carden and Arjun Bhatia.

Meanwhile, Amazon stock is ahead more than 10% at 245.89 in recent action on the stock market today. You can read more about the company’s third-quarter results here.

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