Amazon’s Busy AI Week: Nova AI Shops On Your Behalf, Buy For Me Does It On Competitor Websites

Amazon has unveiled an advanced AI agent that automatically completes tasks on users’ behalf. Nova Act is the retail company’s newest addition to its Nova suite of AI models and follows the implementation of an AI-powered product tracker.

Catch you in the Act

Nova Act is Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence Labs’s first product. The company says its “dream is for agents to perform wide-ranging, complex, multi-step tasks like organizing a wedding or handling complex IT tasks to increase business productivity.”

Act works for both consumers and developers and does most of its heavy lifting through an ability to break down complex workflows into individual sequential steps. The company does not specify how the model scores on a generalised AI benchmark, but it says it focused on testing the model on features that have commonly tripped these kinds of AI agents up, such as date picking, drop-downs, pop-ups, and others.

Act is also programmed to highly value reliability, and the online retail giant seems confident the product will avoid any huge mishaps.

Nova Act follows AI agents like OpenAI’s Operator, which are capable of carrying out extended computational tasks as opposed to general AI agents like ChatGPT 4o, which help users as they carry those tasks out themselves.

Buy For Me in beta

The company dropped another tool called Buy For Me, in beta for its US users. The feature works simply by offering other stores’ products in Amazon’s search results, under the “Shop brand sites directly” section, but only “in some cases,” the retail company says.  When users choose an item, they get a “Buy For You” option, which then takes them to a payment portal without leaving the app. Once payment is confirmed, customers will be notified about delivery by the external store.