Amazon Kills Rufus Chatbot, Launches Alexa for Shopping Agent — 300M Users Migrating to Unified AI Commerce

CNBC·high signal

Amazon is discontinuing its Rufus AI chatbot and launching Alexa for Shopping, an agentic e-commerce assistant that merges Rufus's recommendation engine with Alexa+ capabilities. The tool can compare products side-by-side, schedule purchases when items hit target prices, and auto-add items based on order history. Rolling out free to all US Amazon accounts this week — no Prime or Echo required. Over 300 million customers used Rufus in 2025; this represents Amazon's biggest bet on agentic commerce, turning the search bar into a conversational AI layer.