Good morning from Retail Media Age HQ,
A little while ago, we put out a piece drawing together expert opinions on the topic of conversational advertising in the shopping journey – what it means, and whether it will resonate – that came partly from the news that Amazon would be rolling out ads within its chat assistant, Rufus.
Rufus was first launched in early 2024 and has reportedly become popular with Amazon shoppers in the two years since its launch, with Amazon stating that the assistant was used by more than 300 million customers in 2025. However, now Amazon has revealed that Rufus is being retired – to be replaced with Alexa, who already has a strong established brand as Amazon’s AI ‘persona’, similar to Siri for Apple.
It makes sense for Amazon to streamline its branding around AI assistants, with Alexa having a much longer term of service and stronger name recognition when compared with Rufus. Amazon has also put a lot of work into Alexa in recent years: the company’s 2025 report detailed the extensive steps that were taken to launch Alexa+, the advanced, GenAI-powered version of Alexa. In the words of CEO Andrew Jassy,
“The new Alexa+ is so much more capable, useful, and smart than her prior self. But, we had to completely rewire her brain, corresponding intelligence, breadth of knowledge, routing of services and APIs she accesses, and what routines and jobs she could do. The team had to make these changes while also serving the existing large customer base, and execute a roll out that didn’t break all the functionality on which so many customers have come to rely.”
Amazon confirmed to AdWeek that Alexa for Shopping (as it’s formally called) will incorporate ads and sponsored prompts, so expect all that capability to be brought to bear on nudging shoppers along the purchase funnel and presenting them with relevant product suggestions and information.
In other words, far from putting Amazon’s conversational ad ambitions to bed, the move has only amplified them.
The article reveals that AI overviews will be making an appearance in Amazon search results, which will display a more curated set of products (as spotted during testing by Juozas Kaziukėnas) along with advice about choosing the best item. This may or may not be welcomed by shoppers, who presumably have done their product research before hitting Amazon, but may be a bid to get shoppers into the habit of conducting more of their search journey within Amazon. (All the better for collecting that valuable intent data…)
The new experience also invites shoppers to continue the conversation from their search – which will no doubt juice Alexa for Shopping’s usage figures, but will also make a lot more of the Amazon user experience conversational and open up further opportunities to hit shoppers with the right conversational message at just the right time.
All in all, it seems to be a clear push from Amazon to capture more of the funnel, encouraging shoppers to carry out more upper-funnel research and comparison on its platform, all aided by AI. Assuming that shoppers engage and find the experience helpful, this will also mean that Alexa’s ads carry even more weight as a media product within Amazon. The engagement figures for Rufus were impressive but reports of its ad efficacy were mixed – perhaps Alexa, with its greater integration within the site and enhanced capabilities, will be able to turn the conversational tide here.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT has continued rolling out its ads product to new markets including South Korean, Japan, and the UK, and is putting foundations in place that would stand OpenAI in good stead to comply with the stricter data consent rules within the European Union. Clearly – and unsurprisingly – the thinking is that as consumers increasingly use conversational generative AI tools to inform their decision-making, ad placements must also shift to these all-important sites of influence.
Amazon is clearly hoping its new and improved Alexa will give it a fighting chance in competing with the likes of ChatGPT and Google in this decision-making phase – with the added benefit of an extensive product catalogue to draw on for recommendations and the infrastructure already in place for shoppers to complete the rest of their journey.
