Amazon discontinued its Rufus AI chatbot on May 13, 2026 and replaced it with Alexa for Shopping, a single agentic assistant that can compare products, track prices, look up inventory and complete multi-step purchases across the app, website and Echo Show. The new cursive A icon will appear on 80% of US search result pages starting May 20, with voice integration expanding to all Echo Show models by June and an EU rollout planned for Q3 2026.
Rufus launched in 2024 and was used by more than 300 million customers in 2025, but usage stalled under 5% of total Amazon searches even as monthly active users grew 115% year over year. VP Daniel Rausch said rival AI efforts have struggled with shopping because it is not just scraping web results and then putting things in a conversation. The new agent runs on Anthropic Claude models fine-tuned on Amazon proprietary data, returns answers in under two seconds, and does not require a Prime membership.
Amazon serves over two billion weekly customer visits, and 60% of sales flow through third-party sellers, giving Alexa for Shopping access to one of the largest commerce datasets in the world.