#772 – Amazon’s New AI Tools + AGL Updates

What would faster inventory replenishment and an AI assistant that handles tasks mean for your Amazon business? Recorded at Amazon Accelerate in Seattle, this episode brings together Amazon Global Logistics leaders Alex Berry and Heather Hunt, followed by Chris Jones from the Seller Assistant team. Bradley Sutton explores how Amazon is simplifying the work behind selling, from moving products across borders to managing everyday business decisions.

Alex and Heather explain how AGL reduced end-to-end transit times from China to the U.S. West Coast by about 20% year over year. They also discuss a premium ocean service that cuts China-to-Europe and UK transit times by approximately 11 days compared with standard service. Amazon Managed Placement at Origin simplifies inventory distribution through one booking, while storage at origin can help sellers replenish inventory based on demand. Other announcements include Ship to 3P for deliveries to non-Amazon warehouses, broader support for dangerous goods, and standalone customs brokerage through Amazon Customs and Trade. Online document management and direct access to logistics operators also aim to reduce paperwork and make shipping problems easier to resolve.

Next, Chris Jones explains how Seller Assistant is evolving from answering questions to helping sellers take action. Canvas creates customized workspaces around the task a seller needs to complete, bringing together plans for inventory, promotions, and advertising. Workflows let sellers describe tasks for the assistant to handle in the background, with examples including monitoring top-performing ASINs and reviewing return feedback for potential listing improvements. Chris also discusses Amazon Quick and a Seller Assistant plugin for Claude Code, which was in private beta at the time of recording, along with the controls sellers have over sharing data with other systems.

Together, these conversations highlight opportunities to spend less time coordinating shipments, searching help pages, and repeating routine tasks. For sellers, the next step is to identify where those activities create the biggest bottlenecks and explore which tools fit their business. Whether that means comparing an AGL shipment with your current freight arrangement or testing Seller Assistant on a practical question, start with one process you can improve and build from there.

In episode 772 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Alex, Heather, and Chris discuss:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 01:47 – Amazon Global Logistics Overview
• 04:41 – Faster Shipping And Premium Ocean Service
• 07:53 – Amazon Managed Placement At Origin
• 10:42 – Shipping To Non-Amazon Warehouses
• 14:10 – Dangerous Goods And Customs Updates
• 16:56 – Less Paperwork And Proactive Shipping Support
• 21:31 – McMiller Games Seller Success Story
• 25:25 – Meet Chris Jones And Amazon’s AI Vision
• 27:38 – Seller Assistant, Amazon Quick, And Claude Integration
• 33:21 – Seller Data Security And Sharing Controls
• 38:47 – Canvas And Automated Seller Workflows

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

A big part of Amazon Accelerate announcements was about new AI capabilities, the seller assistant and a new Claude plugin. We bring on the Amazonian in charge of a lot of this, plus we go over a bunch of the new updates to the AGL program announced at Accelerate. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS free, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. All right, we’ve got the dynamic duo from AGL here on the show. Now, Alex is no stranger to the show. He’s been on a couple of times. I’m going to get back to you in a second, but we’ve got a new face here, Heather. Welcome to the show. It’s your first time here. I’d like to get a little bit of background. Alex is living in Nashville now, and he’s went to Missouri University. I don’t remember where he was born. Maybe he can remind me about where were you born and where did you go to university at?

Heather:

I was actually born in Taipei, but I’m from Hong Kong. I moved back to Hong Kong when I was six months old, and I went to university at Yale University.

Bradley Sutton:

Yale University. Now, I kind of looked up what mascot that is, but just tell everybody what it is.

Heather:

The Bulldogs.

Bradley Sutton:

The Bulldogs. Okay, yes, yes. I’ll try and remember that. I thought I knew all the Division One mascots. I didn’t know that one for whatever reason. And what’s your position in the AGL department?

Heather:

I lead product management for AGL.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Alex, what do you do again at AGL? And then for the people who didn’t see the episode, which, by the way, guys, is episode 548. It would be great for you to go pause this, go back there and get a little bit more of an overview. Or Alex, can you just give us the cliff notes of what AGL does?

Alex:

Yeah, absolutely. So I’m Alex. I lead the Amazon Global Logistics team. And, you know, in its simplest form, what AGL is, is it’s Amazon’s first party freight forwarding service. And we are built to help sellers get their goods into Amazon’s inventory. So regardless of where they’re built or manufactured in the world, helping sellers move those goods, you know, through export customs over the ocean, whether that’s on a boat or an airplane, you know, through kind of customs in the United States and into the U.S. network, China and Vietnam into the U.S. are kind of our main lanes. But we also move goods into the U.K., into the E.U., into Japan. We’ve got a bunch of expansions we can talk about that we’ve done. So we’re continuing to kind of grow that. But our goal or our kind of mission every day is to make it as fast, as easy and as economically efficient as possible for sellers to move their goods into Amazon’s network.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, at the end of that episode 548, you had said, hey, come back in a couple of months after Accelerate and ask us what’s new. So here we are at Accelerate. So what’s new?

Alex:

Yeah, I think there’s a couple of big buckets of things. I think, you know, in the supply chain world, especially the last few years, there’s been a lot of changes. And those changes have been typically significant and severe in a short period of time. And so I think the last time we talked, you know, the freight market had been relatively cool for, you know, six to 12 months, kind of post tariffs heading into 2026. And since that time, the freight market has really kind of heated up. Prices have gone up. There’s been kind of limited capacity with everything going on around the world. And it’s been more difficult for sellers and other businesses to secure capacity with ocean liners, with freight forwarding services. Obviously, to get goods, you know, into Amazon or other retailers ahead of the holiday season. So that’s been a really big change in the last six months. That’s more on kind of the macro point on the freight forwarding industry. But with AGL specifically, you know, like we talked about, our focus has really been on how do we continue to make our speeds better for sellers to get their items and their inventory sellable faster and doing so at as low of a cost as we possibly can.

Alex:

And so, you know, year to date, we’re super proud. We’ve reduced our transit times from China to the U.S. West Coast by about 20 percent. We’ve got a handful of sellers who have given us some really good feedback that by switching to AGL, not only have their speeds gotten faster, but they’ve actually been able to reduce their costs by about 15 percent as well. And so that’s really the North Star that we’re trying to work backwards from in its simplest form. And I would say the other thing that’s kind of changed that we’re also really proud of is AGL has become the largest freight forwarder on the Trans-Pacific Eastbound lane. So from Asia into North America, non-vessel operating common carrier is kind of the technical term. But, you know, we see sellers continuing to vote with where they’re booking units, with their wallets. We’ve got a long way to go. There’s a lot of things we can do with our product to make it better. But we’re super excited about the progress that we’ve made.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. You mentioned speed being different. Can Heather, maybe you can dive a little bit more into that?

Heather:

Yeah, I think the headline is really for China to U.S. West Coast, we’ve been able to reduce transit times, end-to-end transit times by about 20 percent year over year. So huge progress there on our, you know, our core lane. And that’s not a target. That’s an actual, you know, that’s what we’ve delivered. And then I think for anybody selling into Europe, one of the big launches that we’ve had is we’ve enabled a new premium ocean service. So premium ocean is a new speed tier that cuts China to EU and UK transit times by about 11 days. So it’s a big reduction in lead times on average compared to our standard ocean service. So, for sellers restocking EU inventory, you know, that’s the difference between being in stock or, you know, out of stock for promotion and missing out. So.

Alex:

And the only other thing I might add, Bradley, and we talked a little about it last time, you know, we talked AGL had just, you know, launched in the last six months a product that we call seller managed placement. So, what that means is, you know, sellers are able to use AGL to ship directly into Amazon’s five regions in the United States. And that was a product that launched last Q4 for AGL. When we talked kind of adoption of that service was growing, but it was a little bit slow. Right. It was kind of in the single digits of AGL’s total bookings. And as we talk about speed and we talk about how we’ve reduced, you know, kind of those end-to-end timelines, you know, from Asia into the West Coast. The question is, you know, how have you reduced those times? One of the big inputs to that answer is we’ve selected more optimal buildings for AGL to move goods into that are closer to the ports to reduce that transit time, you know, from port into the FC, as well as, you know, working with those FCs to receive those goods faster. So that’s been a really big thing that’s kind of driven the speed improvement. And we’ve seen that jump to between 30 and 40 percent of AGL’s bookings in the last couple of weeks. So, again, you know, we see sellers seeing those results, getting their goods into inventory faster, which has led to growth of that product, which we’re also very, very happy about.

Bradley Sutton:

So, when you’re talking when you’re saying that 20 percent reduction in time, is that just from the from the port all the way to the to the D.C.? Are we talking port to port and then there’s an additional savings in time or which is it there?

Alex:

Yeah. So it’s going to be the end-to-end transit time. So from kind of origin port into Amazon’s FC, there will be, you know, some savings over the ocean, some savings potentially at origin. And then really at destination is where the bulk of the opportunity is. And being able to select kind of those more optimal buildings for inventory to flow into that allow faster transit time from port has been, you know, very needle moving.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, definitely important for cash flow, in my opinion, you know, somebody who manufactures here in the States, you know, I can keep a very tight control and maybe just sending a few weeks of inventory at a time knowing that I can back it up really quick. But then if I have to wait, you know, two months to get something from China, Vietnam or whatever, you know, if I’m saving 20 percent time, that’s 20 percent.

Alex:

My cash isn’t just sitting on the water or on a train, you know, somewhere. So that’s excellent. We don’t often hear sellers ask us to deliver their stuff more, more, more slowly.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I don’t think I would ever ask for that. All right. So, one of the announcements here at Accelerate was a new kind of terminology for me. It was called Amazon Managed Placement at Origin or something like that. Can you talk a little bit about it? Because probably the audience who wasn’t here at Accelerate has no idea what that is.

Heather:

Yeah. Alex talked about seller managed placement a little bit earlier. AMP or Amazon Managed Placement at Origin is very similar to seller managed placement in that it’s a regional distribution product. But the benefit of AMP at Origin is that we basically have the seller make one booking. That booking is to bring product into our facilities in China at Origin. And then Amazon just takes care of the rest of it for you. We split that inventory to multiple regions across the U.S. depending on where that demand is. We take demand signals and we split and route your inventory accordingly. And there’s zero incremental effort to the seller. Right. We handle all the documentation splits, all of that effort we take away from the seller so you guys can concentrate on what you do best, which is to grow your business.

Bradley Sutton:

So in other words, I’m not having to try and figure out what goes where and pick the different regions and stuff. It’s all, I guess, hey, pick, I want this to come to America. And then you guys are doing that at the origin of where the shipment comes.

Heather:

We’re doing it at the origin. We’re simplifying that entire experience for you. And we’re charging one all inclusive fee for that service.

Bradley Sutton:

Anything to add to that, Alex?

Alex:

Yeah, no, I think the Amazon Managed Placement at Origin is going to be a big deal to a lot of sellers. I think, you know, Heather hit the majority of the high points. I think the other one that’s worth considering is, you know, you can store at Origin as well. And that’s going to be far less expensive. And kind of, you know, the thing I get most excited about it is, is, you know, if you’re storing at Origin, you know, Amazon can look at what your velocity of sales is and then we can help you kind of drip that inventory into Amazon’s network in the U.S. So, you’re not sending too much too quickly, but you’re getting a little bit more of kind of what’s just in time in terms of not having, you know, high storage rates in the U.S. on more things than you need to and just kind of leveraging that pool of inventory at Origin to kind of sit there. And over time, you’re going to be able to send that to multiple countries, not just the U.S., but I think it’s going to be a big flexibility lever for a lot of sellers.

Bradley Sutton:

So, it’s kind of like it’s not part of the AWD program, but AWD-ish, like where it’s, you know, inventory is being dripped, but it’s being stored in China warehouses as opposed to being stored in American warehouses.

Heather:

Yeah, I think the idea is like we’re very much integrated with AWD’s global warehousing and distribution program. And so we’ll be able to use the storage at Origin, right, which is actually co-located with many of our own cross-docking facilities in China. And so if you have Origin inventory, we can take that inventory and similarly replenish into the network with, you know, a service like AMP at Origin.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, got it. Interesting. So how does placement work overall? You know, I’m a seller trying to figure out these different options. Walk me through it a little bit.

Heather:

Yeah, I mean, placement is everybody’s favorite topic right now. You’ve got to think about, you know, where your product needs to get to across the network. You’ve got to think about inbound placement fees. So, there’s a lot to consider. But I think, you know, from AGL’s perspective, you’re really thinking about you’re making one fundamental choice, right? Either you want to control the distribution of your inventory where you want to send it to, right? Do you want to ship directly to, you know, the five regions? Or do you want to send inventory to Amazon and let us handle it for you? Right. So, if you want to control distribution yourself, you can ship directly to the five regions through AGL with our seller managed placement product. And this path, I think, is really suited for the larger sellers, right? Those who have a lot of volume that they want to ship. Maybe they’re shipping multiple containers and economics are very favorable for that. But if you don’t want to control all that, if you want to just let Amazon sort of take over and do it in a more hands off the wheel way, then I would suggest, you know, a placement product like Amazon Management Place. Sorry, a placement product like Amazon Managed Placement.

Bradley Sutton:

Got it.

Heather:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

So dangerous goods. Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about that. Selling coffin shelves and other just regular wooden products. But for the ones out there, aerosols, lithium batteries, et cetera. Anything new or some changes that the brands need to be aware of?

Heather:

Yeah, I mean, this one has been, you know, dangerous goods. Hazmat has been a huge pain point for many years for our sellers and our shipping customers. Right. You’ve in, you know, prior to this year, our customers have had to use multiple freight forwarders just to get, you know, a portion of their selection also into the network. So this year, for the first time, we’ve opened up AGL to carrying more dangerous goods and hazmat selection. So we can cover about 97 percent of all FBA selection with AGL. And we’re not done yet. Right. So by the end of this year, we should be bringing that number up to more around 99 percent of total FBA selection. So you should be able to use AGL for all of your needs and not have to sort of split shipments across multiple vendors and carriers.

Bradley Sutton:

Next topic is customs. All right. There’s a program. Amazon has Amazon Customs and Trade. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Heather:

Yeah. So Amazon Customs and Trade or ACT, as we call it, is a 1P first party, fully integrated, licensed customs broker. They’re also CTPAT certified. And it’s a core part and integral part of the AGL service offering. What’s new, I think, this year is that customs brokerage is now available as a standalone service. So for those, you know, sellers who are comfortable with their freight forwarder, they want to continue using their freight forwarder. They’ll now be able to access ACT as a standalone service. So, you don’t necessarily need to book freight with AGL to be able to use ACT, although we do think that there are a ton of benefits to doing that. We are offering as a standalone service now.

Alex:

Yeah, I think that’s all totally right. The only other thing that I’ll add is, you know, I think the thing that’s changed maybe since we last talked, or at least in 2026, is the regulatory environment around duties and, you know, kind of customs has changed a little bit. It’s gotten a little bit more strict. I think, you know, sellers are feeling a little bit more pressure on that front. And we’ve seen a large number of sellers who have actually shifted to using ACT. Because at the end of the day, with ACT, the first and foremost thing we care about is being fully compliant with CBP, helping sellers get their inventory into the country the correct way and in a compliant way. And ACT does that before it does anything else. And so I think that value proposition has really started to resonate with folks, helping them sleep a little bit better at night, knowing that everything they’re doing is on the up and up with ACT.

Bradley Sutton:

Adding on to this, this conversation, you know, with customs, obviously, you got to have all your documents in order. I remember when I used to import 20 years ago on my own and I would submit the wrong documents and that really messed me up and things like that. So how is Amazon helping with that potentially or not potentially? It is very tedious process.

Heather:

Documents are super tedious. I think for every shipment you have somewhere between, you know, 27 and sometimes even up to 45 shipping documents that you have to, you know, that you have to submit. And we’ve really focused on this over the last year. We’ve introduced a product called online document management. And so what ODM does is we auto generate shipping documents and we really focused on pre-filling a lot of the information that we already know about. So we’re not asking you to, you know, submit the same information six times or seven times. So ODM as a as a whole is really now cutting documentation and document management really by around, you know, half. So, it’s live today. And, you know, if you’ve ever spent time filling out the same forms over and over again, that’s what we really aim to kill. I think the other thing that we’ve launched that’s been really beneficial to sellers has really helped on a day-to-day basis is Connect Pro. So Connect Pro is our real time inexperienced support program. We connect you directly to our operators and our operators are connected directly to our logistic service providers. So there’s real time threaded communication and it’s a real person that you’re actually talking to. And I think the thing that’s really changed in this past year is Connect Pro has been, you know, it’s very helpful, but a bit reactive. Right. If you had a problem, you would let us know on Connect Pro and we would sort of try to help you out with it. Right now, I think the differentiator for Connect Pro is that we’re actually proactively identifying problems and notifying you before you even find out about them. So it’s really the shift from reactive support to proactive support that we’ve launched with Connect Pro. And I think in concert with programs and features like ODM, we’re really working to sort of cut down the burden of, you know, shipping and documentation and managing that entire process and just making it much simpler for our sellers.

Alex:

And the only thing maybe to emphasize about what Heather’s saying, which is all completely right, is, you know, we’ve heard from multiple sellers over the last 48 hours how much they appreciate being able to talk to a real person when they’re having problems. Everybody’s got their own AI chat bot that’s out there that, you know, they say can solve every problem you have. But at the end of the day, I think we’ve all gone through those experiences and you become dissatisfied with most of them. At the end of the day, like Heather mentioned, right, like this will connect you with operators in China, in the U.S. who are then connected to either our own first party services or the companies that we work with to be able to solve those problems and just kind of that comfort of knowing, hey, when I have an issue, I can actually talk to a person because there’s a lot of things that we can automate. There’s a lot of good that we can do with AI within our business. But for some of these things, you know, each shipment can be the livelihood for each independent seller. And knowing that they’ve got somebody to talk to, not just a chat bot, I think is a very, very comforting thing.

Bradley Sutton:

So many acronyms, AGL, ODM, ACT, ConnectPro is not CP. We’re not going with that yet. We’re just saying we might now. OK, all right. I just started it off. Going back to just AGL in general, you know, like, well, the scale of AGL, like how big is it now? Does that even matter to sellers?

Alex:

Yeah, well, I think there is kind of two ways you can look at it. I think the first way is I mentioned earlier in the conversation, in the first half of 2026, AGL became the largest freight forwarder on the Trans-Pacific eastbound lane. And that’s something that we’re very proud of and we don’t take lightly. Right. That means that what we’re doing is largely working. It’s also a huge tip of the cap to FBA and kind of how large FBA has gotten. So, you know, we have the scale to be operating the way that a large, mature freight forwarder ought to be operating. Right. But I think the other way you could look at it is we don’t have anywhere near a majority of FBA’s inbound volume. And so I think we see a lot of runway in order to, you know, continue to grow and to make AGL as obvious of a choice for sellers as we possibly can. I think we’re very proud of a lot of the improvements we’ve made over the last couple of years. You know, obviously we’ve had conversations over the last 18 months with you kind of highlighting some of those. But we’ve got a lot of room to go. We love to say at Amazon, it’s still day one for what we’re doing. And I think that’s very true for AGL. So happy with the progress, excited about the progress, but even more excited about kind of the road ahead because there’s a lot of good we can do for sellers that we have not yet done.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. I think, you know, we’ve got a lot of different sellers who are watching this show and they’re like, all right, this is great, Bradley. You know, we’re hearing from Amazonians themselves what this program is. But what about real people like us? Like, like, can you tell us a seller story, maybe a real-life seller story about this, what we’ve been talking about, but actually in practice?

Alex:

Yeah, I think, you know, a good example and someone who’s on stage here this week is a company called McMiller Games. It was a couple who started kind of like a board game, kind of card company. And they started off building these games for their family members. You know, they kind of as a side hobby started kind of an online store. And, you know, they had kind of the shocks. I went viral moment that a lot of people would like to have. But it really catapulted them from kind of fulfilling out of I think it was their mother’s garage who was dropping off packages at the post office every day to saying, oh, like I need some real scale to be able to do this. And so that moved them to FBA. And, you know, there’s a great story about how FBA provided them the platform in order to grow and kind of scale their business from more than just a side hobby to like actually their business today. But, you know, what we’re really proud of. Is that Miller Games has started using S&P in the last 12 months and unbeknownst to us when we met them this week, exactly the value proposition we were hoping for with S&P is what hit them. Right. They were trying to make shipments directly into the regions. They didn’t want to deal with kind of the time or the extra cost associated with shipping into a national I.X.D. And sort of having Amazon split and kind of distribute that inventory across the five regions. They wanted to go direct. And so they saw a bunch of time savings and they saw a bunch of cost savings.

Alex:

And then, you know, we’ve launched kind of a new iteration of our S&P product in the last few months. We call S&P Express, which is as you go through Seller Central and kind of the booking process, you’ve got the ability to select specific, you know, regional crosstalks with an Amazon’s network to say, hey, this is where I want my goods to go because they’re faster than others. And Miller Games does about 80 percent of their annual business during the holidays. And so as we get to this time period, they say, hey, like that’s totally worth it for me as insurance to make sure that I have my inventory in the right place ahead of time because they’ve got a lot of kind of examples of times historically where prior freight forwarders that they’ve used have not gotten their inventory in stock in time. And that’s obviously cost them, you know, a huge chunk of their business. And so, you know, they went through the process without knowing us exactly the way that we would want them to. And so I think their story is, you know, obviously great for FBA, but a huge advocate of the way we’re thinking about building our products. Because at the end of the day, if I’m a seller, right, I want my inventory sellable as fast as I can for as for as economical as a price as I can. And that’s exactly what S&P is designed to do.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So last question. Somebody is listening to this right now, whether they’re here at Accelerate or listening to this on YouTube or on the podcast, what action should they take?

Alex:

Yeah, well, I think there’s a couple of things. I think one is, you know, you can Google Amazon Global Logistics. You can choose if you want to, you know, select the paid advertisement or the unpaid advertisement. But I think that’ll take you right to our landing page. And I think, you know, that will give you some information about the program, give you the right steps. We’re also available, you know, in Seller Central. So, you can navigate, you know, through Seller Central directly to that landing page as well. I think those two steps would be the right ones for folks to take in order to get started. And, you know, as folks take those steps, you know, we’ve got teams standing by who are more than happy to, you know, look at historical shipments, run, you know, examples and say, hey, had you done this via AGL? Here’s the options you would have had. Here’s what the price would have been. Here’s what the timeline would have been to make comparison to their existing freight forwarders. You know, pretty easy and straightforward. And the, you know, the result of that may not be perfect for everybody, but I’m very, very confident that for the vast majority of sellers, they would see improvement through AGL. And hopefully that gives them, you know, some of the evidence that they need to say, hey, let’s give this a shot and kind of give it a trial for a shipment. I’m very, very happy about the fact that I’m confident that you’re going to like what you experience.

Bradley Sutton:

You guys have your homework set. Go check it out. Google it or check the link in the description below and you’ll be able to go directly to the page to get more information. Alex and Heather, thank you so much for joining us and look forward to seeing what new you guys have cooking in the kitchen next year at Accelerate. Thanks for having us.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Very excited for our next guest, Chris here. First time on the show. So before we get into the meat and potatoes of what you’re going to be talking about, I’d like to get to know you a little bit better. We’re here in Seattle. Where were you born and raised originally?

Chris:

I actually came from Texas. I grew up in Texas, made the rounds there, lived in New Mexico for a little while.

Bradley Sutton:

Is that where you went to college?

Chris:

No, I did college in Texas, got my PhD at UT Austin.

Bradley Sutton:

How long have you been at Amazon and what do you do there today?

Chris:

I have been at Amazon 12 years and so kind of long time Amazonian. I’ve been working on artificial intelligence and machine learning the whole time and almost 20 years doing machine learning type work for industry. And the last several years, probably no surprise, our focus has been on AI and agentic intelligence, really focused on helping sellers.

Bradley Sutton:

So just in general, can you talk about why AI is so important for brand sellers out there?

Chris:

Yeah, well, you know, here’s one way to think about this. You know, it’s well understood that data driven decision making, artificial intelligence, these are things that can really, really help a business optimize. And I think one of the things that was very clear early on to us is that taking that depth of expertise that we have an Amazon, we have 25 years of, you know, expertise developed around how to sell in e-commerce and globally. And if we can actually use AI to empower sellers to optimize their business, then we think it can be as game changing for every small sellers as it has for companies like Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

So I think one of the big things at Accelerate announced was all around seller assistance. And so for those who don’t know, first of all, I hope people know what seller assistance is, but now it’s been out for a while. But for those who don’t know, brief overview of what seller assistance is and maybe some of the cool announcements.

Chris:

Sure. So my team is the one building seller assistance. I’m really proud of this team’s work. And so that’s what we want to talk about. One is the really huge increases in capabilities and intelligence within seller assistance. And I can get into some of those details. The next is the ability for seller assistance to really start operating with some autonomy on behalf of sellers. And that’s what we call workflows. And then I think a really exciting thing for a lot of sellers is we are pushing it out into the world. So, starting with Amazon’s Quick product, which is fantastic, and sellers will talk about this. They should go and try it. And they’re going to get to as well as even like a private beta for Claude Code. So, this is our plugin, taking our agentic intelligence, putting it out there into the places where sellers are already using AI.

Bradley Sutton:

So kind of like a MCP between Amazon, your data in Amazon, your seller central account and Claude.

Chris:

That’s a great way to think about it. But made super easy. So sellers who may not be really familiar with doing integrations, plugging these in to Claude or using Quick, this is something that can take a minute.

Bradley Sutton:

What is Quick just for those who hadn’t heard about that?

Chris:

Quick is this fantastic product from AWS. Actually, most Amazonians that you talk to would tell you how much they love it because we all use it. And it’s a essentially a kind of agentic workspace for it’s for doing work. It’s great for businesses. And it’s a place where you can bring together agents and agentic flows to do work on your behalf, where it’s really easy to plug in data and connections to other systems.

Bradley Sutton:

Love it. And I remember sellers have until December 31st, they can actually have a free one year. Can I just go into the seller assistant and say, hey, how do I sign up for Quick? Is there a separate website for this or?

Chris:

We’re rolling it out to all sellers worldwide. And it’s like you said, it’s a 12-month subscription to the Quick Plus plan. And this applies to the seller and two of their co-workers too.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Let’s go back to the plugin that you were referring to. I’m super excited about that. Here at Helium 10, we have an MCP with Claude. And so people are already using Helium 10 data. And it’s super exciting to me because now, hey, leverage your Helium 10 data. Now start bringing in more of your Amazon data and then using Claude’s intelligence. Talk a little bit more about what brands, sellers are going to be able to do with this plugin.

Chris:

So essentially, our idea is that all the capabilities that you have via seller assistant, and seller assistant, by the way, it’s using many of the same SPAPIs that many sellers who are building their own solutions on top of our systems are using. Seller assistant is also using all of that, as well as all of this intelligence that we have brought forth into it. And that’s really what we think with seller assistant is the incredible value add is that kind of infusion of capability and the intelligence to know how to orchestrate all of that. And with the plugin, you get that. You get that brought into the systems where you work and the tools that you’re used to working with. And I actually think this is where things are going with agentic AI just generally is we’re going to get all of us eventually very comfortable with bringing together systems and agents from different parties that we work with and having them all work together on our behalf. And so that’s where we see things really going and we want to be there for sellers. And we want to help bring our really kind of deep experience and understanding of how to do this, how to do this well with the right security, the right kind of privacy around the data and all of that within the systems that sellers are already using or will be using in the future.

Bradley Sutton:

I like it. I like it. You know, at Helium 10, we also have kind of like our own AI agentic tool inside of Helium 10. But then we heard from customers like, hey, no, we use Claude. We use whatever. And it’d be nice to be able to work in our own ecosystem where we already have our SOPs and stuff. And so the same thing for Amazon sellers who are already using Claude, you’re not like forcing, no, you have to use only the seller assistant. But now they’re going to be able to just integrate that into their own SOPs.

Chris:

That’s right. Yeah. And actually, you know, I do want to emphasize with Claude in particular, we’ve been working with Anthropic actually since the beginning of our work in 2023. So I and my team and seller assistant has greatly benefited from the engagement with Anthropic, the partnership, and it’s really influenced how we’ve thought about building out this technology for our selling partners.

Bradley Sutton:

Since I have you here, any timeline of when sellers will be able to start accessing this new thing?

Chris:

So for the AWS Quick, this is coming out to sellers right now. So be on the lookout for it. Try it out. You really should. It’s a fantastic product and it’s great to use. For the plugin with Claude, we’re still in the private beta. This is just the beginning. I’m not going to give you a timeline because I don’t know.

Bradley Sutton:

Worth a try, guys.

Chris:

I know it’s coming very soon. This isn’t where we stop either. We want to be everywhere sellers are working in and make it accessible.

Bradley Sutton:

You could almost say it’s always day one. So, something, you know, I work for a data company in the Amazon space. So, a question I get all the time is how secure is my data, right? I’m connecting my Amazon account through Helium 10, but now it’s going to Claude. Is Claude going to expose all of my private data to all users over the world and train their models and this and that? For the customer, I’m sure you’ve gotten questions like this before.

Chris:

Sure. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

So what is the answer to ease their concerns?

Chris:

Well, I mean, I think that we’ve always been very thoughtful about securing seller’s data. And I think nothing has really changed about that focus on securing seller’s data and being very clear about how we’re using it on behalf of sellers and to improve their experience. And that it’s secure within AWS infrastructure. That’s still true with the plugin that any of the processes that are happening within Seller Assistant through our MCPs, those are happening on AWS infrastructure. But as I think to your point, as you start to go out into this world where you start bringing data together across all these different products, I do think everybody should be thinking carefully about how they’re sharing data across these products. With the plugin, you have clear controls around that data sharing. You know exactly what you are sharing from the plugin to other systems. And that’s how we want to design it. We want to give sellers that level of control. But I think sellers should be thoughtful. Who is this that I’m going to share data with? And what are they going to do with it? So, I think good to understand what their position is.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now, going back to what we started talking about Seller Assistant being a big theme here, you know, like again, Seller Assistant is not new. I’ve been using it for more than a year now. But like some of my use cases, I found it very useful for us. Like, for example, I’ve said this anecdote many times, but Amazon doesn’t have a full published list of, for example, all the compliance issues as far as like which words are forbidden or what are kind of like borderline words, like things have to do with pesticide that could potentially get you in trouble. And then just finding, you know, what’s the latest on coupons and like what the policies are on this and that. It would take forever to look in help documents and just use that search bar. And then Seller Assistant answers it really fast. But you kind of touched on some of the cool new innovations that were announced. Let’s go a little bit deeper if we can.

Chris:

Well, let me start by saying you hit on something that’s really important here that was clear from early on with this technology is it enables a lot more transparency, right? And, you know, and I think that’s a combination of the way that modern A.I. and generative A.I. is. Obviously, it’s all about language. It’s all about, you know, clear, clear use of language, clearly articulating things. Now, behind that, there has to be there’s a lot of work in developing, you know, and maybe some of our watchers know this term, but the harness. How do you connect the intelligence to all of the underlying content and data and capabilities and tools and APIs and functions and all of that with things like memory and guardrails and so on? And so really, our focus is on building that harness to really effectively allow Seller Assistant to, as you said, clearly articulate how we’re looking at our policies and how they relate to a particular seller. Right. And so that’s very exciting.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Learning about, you know, I think the example given was like, hey, maybe it knows a seller has a tendency to do lightning deals for, you know, prime week or something like that. Well, it’ll say, hey, you usually do lightning deals. Here’s what would happen if you did a lightning deal this year and stuff. And maybe somebody has some other kind of thing that they have a tendency to do. It’ll learn that and be able to suggest that. So that was a real cool.

Chris:

Yeah, no, it’s great. And the other thing like that that I think touches on that is that deeper understanding of the seller and their business and their catalog is combined with the other thing that we’ve invested a tremendous amount. And, you know, back to the harness, it’s loading up all the tools and all the capabilities that we have within Amazon selling into this agentic AI. Yeah. Those lightning deals now you can do right there and, you know, other promotions and starting to figure out how to do your ads and all of that. And I think it’s really exciting for sellers to see that growth and capability.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I’m excited about some of the things, you know, like in Helium 10, we have a lot of automations that you can do for things even in your Amazon account. But there’s things that have never been available, like in the API, such as coupon creation and promotions and things that honestly, you know, I’ll be honest, it’s kind of tedious to do it in Seller Central.

Chris:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

And we want like I wish this was available API. Helium 10 could make this so much easier. But like, you know, like when I do a what’s it called like a not a lightning deal, but just a regular discount for Prime Day. Right. And one thing I couldn’t really talk to because I must have been outside of the room during this announcement was about Canvas. So, can you talk about that? Because I know nothing about that.

Chris:

Great. I’m so glad you brought up Canvas, which so the way to think about this is we you I’m sure that that sellers are familiar now with our new version of Seller Central that has come out. And we’ve really tried to be thoughtful about how to create something that really makes sense from how a seller would run their business with clear workspaces across kind of the major areas of inventory and their products. And but we also know that sellers really what they need they know best. Right. Each seller knows exactly the experience that they need to manage the use case in front of them at that moment. And so what we have now launched is the ability to start a conversation with seller assistant maybe about some complex task or issue that you’re facing and create the experience right there in front of them. Create the UI based on what they need at that moment. And what’s beautiful about this is so if you’re deep diving something let’s say it’s related to you know let’s say getting ready for peak. Right. And so you know you’re starting to think about setting up your promotions and seller assistant says you know you should kind of think about your promotions your inventory management right up to kind of getting ready for your advertising campaign and it will just create that experience for you right there with the plan laid out and all the tasks and that’ll start helping you automate those tasks.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Another thing I’d like to get some more info on you alluded to earlier, workflows.

Chris:

Yeah. Workflows. Yeah. Workflows. So this you know this I think is not going to be surprising to sellers that you don’t want to always have to go if you think of seller assistant as like your employee you don’t have to tell your employee everything that they have to do right. You want to say hey go handle this take care of it and you know and come to me for approval when I need you to. And so that’s workflows is it’s literally just let me as a seller explain what I want seller assistant to do and it’s going to go off and work in the background and you know it might be something like why don’t you kind of keep track of my top performing ASINs and tell me when I need to kind of adjust my ad spend or if I want to look at my returns and see what sellers are telling me about my returns and then figure out if maybe I need to make listing updates to address some of the concerns that are raised during returns. So these are the kinds of things that you can imagine asking somebody on your team to go do now you can ask sellers. I love it.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So we’ve talked about the plugin. We’ve talked about seller assistant, workflows. How do all these work together? What’s your vision for the brands out there?

Chris:

Well, you know I mean our vision is that no matter where sellers are they have seller assistant they’re ready to do work for them ready on demand. So to dive deep using things like canvas to just create the experience to better go deep on their business help them understand what to do and then with workflows just you know take it and do it. And I think this is kind of all of us are developing this relationship with agentic AI where we see more and more opportunity not just to kind of go deep and do the strategic work together and you know get answers and understand things but then to actually have it go off and do work for us. And so this really bringing all of that together and then making it accessible wherever sellers are doing their work that’s the point of what we’re so excited to talk about this year.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it. All right. Well thank you for all that you and your team do you know it’s making I’m not I don’t just work at Helium 10 I have my own brands and so I already said how it’s helped me you know and all these innovation it helps put time back in our pockets and now we can like spend time developing products or streamlining other workflows and stuff and the bottom line is that’s going to help us as sellers so appreciate it and look forward to what you guys have next.

Chris:

Awesome. Love it.

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