Amazon’s “Help Me Decide” tool wants to help you shop

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If you’ve ever spent 45 minutes scrolling through wireless headphones on Amazon only to give up and watch Netflix instead, congratulations, you’re exactly who Amazon’s new AI feature was built for.

The retail giant has launched a new shopping assistant called “Help Me Decide”, which aims to push you from “just browsing” to “order confirmed” using a healthy dose of artificial intelligence. 

Available now in the US via the Amazon app and mobile browser, the tool uses your searches, browsing history, and preferences to recommend the perfect product, or at least the one Amazon thinks will finally make you hit “Buy Now.”

Here’s how it works: if you’ve been wandering the digital aisles for too long, a “Help Me Decide” button appears on the product page, offering to end your indecision once and for all. 

Tap it, and Amazon’s AI quickly analyzes your behavior, those headphones you compared, that camping gear you lingered on, even your kids’ hiking boots from last month, and serves up three picks: the “best fit,” an “upgrade,” and a “budget-friendly alternative.”

Amazon says the recommendations come with a short explanation, using features and customer reviews to justify its choices, which means how much you trust the tool may depend on how much you trust random internet strangers. 

The system runs on Amazon’s Bedrock and SageMaker AI platforms, combined with its OpenSearch tool, pulling in data from all corners of your shopping habits.

This isn’t Amazon’s first AI shopping experiment, either. 

Earlier this year, it rolled out Interests, which tailors product results to natural-language prompts (“Show me cozy winter jackets for city walks”), and started testing AI-generated hosts that summarize products for you before checkout.

In short, Amazon’s new AI wingman is here to make sure your “thinking about buying” phase ends quickly, preferably with something in your cart. 

So the next time you hesitate between two gadgets, don’t worry: Amazon’s AI already knows which one you’ll “decide” to buy.