Perplexity Shopping Agent Gets Sued By Amazon

Big Tech giants suing each other is nothing new. But why wouldn’t Amazon want Agentic AI browsing its stores?

Anything to ship more products right?

It’s not like they are anti-AI. AWS is peddling cutting-edge agentic AI tech, so they clearly have the technical capability to give access to Agents.

Perhaps, until you look at what services really have profit margins.

It has been speculated Amazon’s promoted products (Advertising) could have up to a 50% profit margin, and it’s growing.

Compare that with the razor-thin profit margins of shipping a physical product of their own, which include the logistical costs of constructing, promoting, and distributing the products.

To be clear, if Amazon is doing the fulfillment of the promoted product, those costs still exist, and they still get a small profit margin from the sale, but they also get the additional profit that the seller pays to promote the product on top of that, really juicing up the total net profit.

If they allowed your personal AI Agent to do your shopping for you, they couldn’t sell your human attention to advertisers at such a nice profit margin.

Amazon is working on adding its own Agent tools, such as Rufus, which I would wager will, in one way or another, keep the products sellers are paying to promote at the top of its results. Therefore, ensuring Amazon keeps those sweet, sweet profit margins.

I am not speculating on the morality of this or even placing bets on who will win the suit. I am just pointing out Amazon’s motivations.