At its Accelerate conference in Seattle on Sept. 23, Amazon rebuilt Seller Assistant from a question-and-answer chatbot into a continuously running agent, and, for the first time, opened its marketplace data to an outside AI model through a Selling Partner plugin now in U.S. beta with Anthropic’s Claude.

The upgrade lets third-party merchants describe conditions in plain English and hand them off. Amazon’s own examples read like standing orders: “Monitor my top category for competitive openings. If you see one, adjust my pricing and refresh the listings.” Or: “Alert me if any of my top 10 products drop below a 4-star rating and draft a response plan.” Workflows run against seller-defined guardrails with full audit trails.

“The vast majority of our selling partners are now using Seller Assistant. Not only are they using it, but they’re trusting it,” said Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon’s vice president of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience. The tool, launched in 2023, now has hundreds of thousands of active users and reaches more than 90 percent of selling partners in their native language. It “doesn’t just answer questions,” Westmoreland told PYMNTS; sellers, she said elsewhere, “would never have to log into Seller Central.”

That trust is doing real work in the pitch. Amazon says sellers accept its recommendations “more than 90% of the time,” a figure Anthropic field CTO Eric Burns repeated verbatim. Jigar Thakkar, AWS’s vice president of Agentic AI for Business, said Quick “provides sellers with a powerful context-backed agent to help them run their entire business more efficiently.” Burns called it “a snap to connect Amazon accounts to Claude,” about 60 seconds, no code. James Oliver, founder of beta tester Atlas Bar, said work that “took an afternoon now happens instantly.”

The commercial logic is legible. Independent sellers account for more than 60 percent of Amazon units sold worldwide and generated $46.8 billion in fees last quarter, alongside $19.8 billion in advertising revenue growing 26 percent year over year. Every primary account holder gets a free 12-month Amazon Quick Plus subscription, plus two coworkers, through Dec. 31, 2026. The FTC’s antitrust trial in Seattle is scheduled for March 2027; Amazon calls the case “wrong on the facts and the law.” Amit Agarwal, a 27-year veteran, took over selling partner services in February after Dharmesh Mehta became CEO Andy Jassy’s technical advisor.

For small-team sellers, the practical shift is that marketplace operations, listing hygiene, pricing, competitive response, become always-on and effectively free. The Agile Brand Guide already flagged the drift risk of approving nine of ten proposals reflexively, which is the honest catch inside a 90% acceptance rate.

What Seller Assistant still can’t do is find customers who aren’t already on Amazon. That’s the gap LemonLime works in, preparing off-Amazon lead discovery, personalized outreach, and content or partnership opportunities across channels the marketplace never touches. The complement is specific: agentic operations inside Seller Central, agentic customer growth outside it. It’s the same trajectory visible in Meta’s Muse shopping agent and in Amazon’s move to open its advertiser base to ChatGPT: the platforms are conceding that AI, not the dashboard, is where the seller actually lives.

Sources