Amazon just gave every third-party seller a robot CEO… for free.

As if Bezos didn’t already have the entire ecommerce market cornered and screaming for mercy… They’ve decided to turn the heat up even more.

Today, Amazon announced it’s giving third-party sellers a full-blown AI assistant… and unlike the last one that was about as valuable as a water gun in a knife fight. Surprisingly, this one actually does stuff for you like a college-educated intern. And the best part is it doesn’t have a salary, it doesn’t ever need to sleep, and has zero boundaries.

Unveiled at its Accelerate conference (aka “How to Keep Selling Sh*t on Our Platform 2025”), the new version of Seller Assistant isn’t just smarter… it’s agentic. Which sounds like a made-up word, and is something that’s been on the AI hype train for years… but apparently it’s here now. But in Amazon-speak, it means the AI can now take actions on behalf of sellers. With permission, of course. And if we’re all being real, nothing says “we respect your independence” like a trillion-dollar company politely asking before running your entire business.

(Source: TechCrunch)

To be clear, Amazon’s not exactly new to the AI game. Its seller tools have already been used by over 1.3 million merchants. Their AI can write product listings, generate images and videos, and now… pretty much do everything short of packaging the goods itself. But this upgrade is one massive leap for Bezos and Co. It's moving from suggestive AI to executive AI… which simply means the system can now execute real decisions, not just offer up options.

Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s VP of “Worldwide Selling Partner Services” (aka Chief Vibe Officer for Making Up Fancy Titles), says the new AI gives sellers “a team of experts.” Which, sure, sounds like corporate fluff… but he’s not entirely wrong. Most small businesses don’t have the cash (or the sanity) to build a team of supply chain nerds, ad wizards, customer support masochists, and spreadsheet-obsessed pricing strategists. So yeah, assuming this robo-brain can deliver even half of what they’re hyping, it’s gonna be yuge.

Now here’s the part that I’m not falling for: Amazon says this is free. As in, zero dollars. As in, “no plans to charge sellers” for this magic tool. Which is very sweet. And extremely temporary. Because if we’ve learned anything from the Amazon School of Monetization, it’s that the first hit is always free… and the second one shows up as a line item on your seller fees called something like “Seller Assistant Premium” with an asterisk and a Terms & Conditions link that crashes halfway through.

At the end of the day, this is Amazon doing what it does best: building “solutions” that solve your problems by making you more dependent on them. Third-party sellers already make up more than half of everything sold on the platform ($40.3 billion in Q2 alone). The more efficiently those sellers run, the faster Amazon’s money printer goes brrr… through ads, logistics, warehousing, data slurping, and whatever other monetization tentacles it can quietly wrap around your business. And if Amazon’s AI happens to be the one helping you grow… well, that’s just vertical integration disguised as mentorship.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Amazon as mentioned in the article.