Amazon calls on AI once again with its new ‘Help Me Decide’ shopping tool (www.engadget.com)

Amazon has launched "Help Me Decide," a mobile and mobile-browser feature in the US that uses AI to nudge indecisive shoppers toward a purchase. The button appears on product pages after you’ve browsed several related items; if tapped, the tool analyzes your browsing history, searches and preferences to recommend a primary pick, an upgrade, and a budget alternative. It can cluster related searches (e.g., camping gear and kids’ sleeping bags to suggest a four-person tent), surface supporting customer reviews, and provide an explanation of why a particular product suits your needs. For the AI/ML community the rollout is notable for its integrated production stack and real-world personalization use case: Amazon says Help Me Decide uses Bedrock and SageMaker for model work and OpenSearch for retrieval and matching, implying a retrieval-augmented recommendation flow that blends user signals, product metadata and review text. That highlights challenges and opportunities around real-time inference, model ops at scale, evaluation of recommendation quality, and privacy/consent for using behavioral data. It also continues Amazon’s pattern of embedding LLM-driven features in commerce (following Interests and AI-generated hosts), raising issues around transparency, review aggregation reliability, feedback loops that may amplify certain products, and how to measure downstream impact on conversions and user trust.