Amazon’s new AI agent is designed to do your shopping
Amazon has launched a new AI model, Nova Act, which is designed to perform tasks — like online shopping — in your browser. For now it’s only available to developers in a “research preview,” but Amazon is also expanding access to its other Nova AI models through a web portal, making them easier to find and use.
Nova Act is a new model whose function sounds similar to OpenAI’s Operator agent. Amazon says Act can carry out web searches, make purchases, or answer questions about what’s on the screen, including the option to perform tasks on a schedule. It can also recognize more detailed instructions — such as telling it “don’t accept the insurance upsell” while making a purchase. Act is currently only accessible to developers, but Amazon says it’s already being put to use carrying out some online tasks in the upgraded Alexa Plus assistant.
Act is the first product to be released by Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Labs, which 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.” Amazon and OpenAI are far from the only companies chasing AI agents right now, in the hope that people are willing to pay for AI assistants capable of performing tasks rather than simply answering questions or generating Ghibli art.
Act joins the other five Nova models first announced in December 2024, which include a trio of “understanding” models, along with image and video generators. Rather than claiming to offer the most powerful AI models around, Amazon has instead emphasized the speed and value of the Nova suite, which it says are “at least 75 percent less expensive” than comparable rivals.
Amazon is now adding a way for developers and other people in the US to more directly access these models: a website that lets them use the models to answer queries or generate content. The models were previously only available through Amazon Bedrock, an AI model platform within Amazon Web Services that offers access to Nova alongside third-party models from DeepSeek, Anthropic, Meta, and more. Rohit Prasad, SVP of Amazon AGI, says the site is meant to let developers “quickly test their ideas with Nova models, and then implement them at scale in Amazon Bedrock.”