Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
- Amazon debuted Rufus, an AI chatbot, last year. It's supposed to help you shop.Rufu answers questions about specific products or recommends items. I didn't think it was that great last year.I thought I should give it another chance this year. Here's what I thought.
It's one year in for Amazon's AI bot — named Rufus — that promised to help answer all your product questions.
So, just in time for Amazon Prime Day, it's time to ask: How's Rufus working? Last year, I thought it was only so-so, but it's worth catching up to see if it's improved.
After trying it out again on Monday, I have to say: It has improved in some ways. (Want to know how long the battery life on that camping lantern is? Rufus can help!)
But it also might be that I've now better adjusted my expectations for AI in general: After a year of Rufus, ChatGPT, Perplexity — all of it! — I've sort of learned how to temper my expectations. Sometimes, AI will get it right, and sometimes … it won't.
Being AI, there's also some weirdness. On the Amazon homepage, I asked in the little "Ask Rufus" box what I should buy for Prime Day. It answered with a link to information about Prime membership. Hmm … not quite what I was looking for.
Amazon
When I tried again, this time asking "What are some of the best Prime Day deals?" it did give me a list of items — the Echo Show, Kindle Paperwhite, a Ring doorbell, an Echo Dot, and a Fire TV Stick.
I noticed that all of these recommendations were Amazon products. Maybe Rufus is trained to promote Amazon's own wares, or maybe those were indeed some of the most popular and deepest discounted Prime Day items. (Amazon usually does steeply discount its own stuff for Prime Day.)
Amazon appears to think that the AI shopping assistant is helping its bottom line. In April, Business Insider's Eugene Kim obtained internal documents from Amazon that had predictions that Rufus was already indirectly contributing to the company's operating profit.
Testing Amazon's 'Rufus'
Amazon
As far as my test this time around, there was one thing I found particularly frustrating — and something I encountered more than once.
When I asked Rufus for product recommendations for an item that could have lots of options — like for a beach coverup, for instance — it gave me a list of products, but no links. Just item numbers.
I suppose I could copy and paste those numbers into the search bar to look up the products? But frankly, I'd be just as happy searching "beach coverups" and browsing visually. I'm not sure how Rufus's help is really better than Amazon's own traditional search here.
I asked Amazon corporate if there were specific new features added to Rufus over the last year; a spokesperson pointed me to an internal blog post on new AI-enabled features, including Rufus, which it describes as "having a shopping assistant with you any time you're in our store."
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Bloomberg's Austin Carr also recently tried Rufus and found it lacking. When he asked a particular question about a car accessory for his Subaru, it answered that the accessory would definitely fit a Maserati. (Perhaps Rufus is being sycophantic here by upgrading his ride?!)
My colleague Ana Altcheck tried Rufus when it debuted last year, and she pointed out at the time that Amazon can be hard to navigate — you can't exactly find things you don't even know exist on the site. In theory, Rufus can help with that.
For now, I still prefer the ancestral methods of Amazon shopping: reading through curated lists of good deals or products, or typing into the search bar the things that I know I want.
