Amazon sellers are using ChatGPT to help write product listings in sprawling marketplace
Packages move along a conveyor at an Amazon fulfillment center on Cyber Monday in Robbinsville, New Jersey, U.S., on Monday, Nov. 29, 2021.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Chad Rubin was looking for a way to spice up his Amazon listing for a vacuum hose. He was struggling to come up with a catchy title that would make shoppers want to click on his hose instead of the countless others in Amazon’s vast marketplace.
For assistance, Rubin turned to ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that’s gone viral since its launch late last year. He soon began to experiment with the tool for completing tasks such as generating copy on his product page. Rubin asked ChatGPT to “generate 5 insanely clever and catchy headlines” for an infographic promoting his vacuum cleaner hose.
“Dirt destroying air flow,” he said, reading off one of ChatGPT’s responses. “I would have never in a million years thought of that for a vacuum hose.”
As ChatGPT rapidly finds its way into use by lawyers, clinicians, professors and their students, it’s also showing its utility in the business world, notably for Amazon sellers seeking the tiniest competitive advantage as they try to bolster sales. Third-party merchants who have embraced ChatGPT say it can make the job of selling on Amazon’s marketplace easier and more lucrative.
A stream of YouTube videos, articles and LinkedIn posts have appeared in recent months touting the benefits of ChatGPT for Amazon sellers. E-commerce software providers such as JungleScout have also jumped on the trend by integrating ChatGPT into their services.
“This is one of those technologies that is going to fundamentally change everything we do in our lives,” said JungleScout technology chief Stephen Curial, who previously spent a decade at Amazon in software development. “It’s that powerful.”
Curial said it won’t be long before generative AI tools such as ChatGPT become ordinary productivity aides, similar to calculators or spellcheck, helping busy businesspeople minimize daily grunt work.
ChatGPT has taken the technology industry by storm since it was introduced to the public in November by OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed startup that’s reportedly held talks with investors to sell shares at a $29 billion valuation.
Millions of people are using the free chatbot to do things such as write fiction, generate computer code and edit resumes. Microsoft has incorporated the technology into its Bing search engine, while Google introduced rival chatbot Bard last month.
Investors are pouring into the market with massive checks even as the broader tech startup market continues to suffer from the 2022 downturn. Last week, a 22-person pre-revenue startup called Character.AI, which was founded by two former Google employees, raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Hamza Amor, an Amazon seller and founder of e-commerce consulting firm Fussy Penguins, has posted TikTok videos showing how ChatGPT can help merchants discover their next hit product.
Amor started experimenting with ChatGPT in December, asking it questions such as “Tell me more about you” and “What is the meaning of life?” He then asked it to write small passages, such as a children’s story, and was impressed by the results.
ChatGPT helped him improve his products after he asked the chatbot to summarize what users like and dislike about an item based on a set of reviews. For an under-desk footrest, it suggested he use different packaging and more durable materials, or consider offering multiple sizes and the ability to adjust the height of the footrest.
‘It does it in seconds’
The software also assisted with the writing of a few listings, a process that normally requires hours of writing and editing.
“It does it with the tone you suggest, and it does it in seconds,” Amor said. “That’s the part that was mind-blowing.”
ChatGPT’s handiwork has already delivered results for some users. Rubin said the conversion rate, or the percentage of clicks on an ad that result in sales, went up for several of his vacuum filters, coffee filters and air filters after he used ChatGPT for help with listings. For one product, the conversion rate increased from an average of 26% to 46% over an eight-week period, he said.
Rubin sees the opportunity to further capitalize on the trend by giving other sellers a streamlined way to use it. That’s important because third-party sellers are often managing dozens, if not hundreds, of listings on Amazon at the same time and are competing with many new sellers every day.
In 2021, Rubin started a pricing software company called Profasee, which has used AI in some of its features. Rubin said he plans to incorporate ChatGPT into a new tool that will help sellers quickly fine-tune their product listings.
But despite the hype, there’s good reason for skepticism when it comes to ChatGPT’s effectiveness. The nascent technology has shown that it’s prone to making mistakes and, in some cases, just making stuff up. ChatGPT learns to write by analyzing large volumes of information from the internet, and it can get things wrong, a phenomenon that AI experts call “hallucination.”
Aidan Duffy, a seller who also runs a consulting firm, turned to ChatGPT to help improve the listing for a sauna backrest, one of his newer products. Not only did the chatbot assist with writing bullet points on the listing, it also suggested he create an adjustable backrest for taller or shorter users, which he said he considered having manufactured.
Still, Duffy said he has some concerns about the technology’s accuracy. He recently used it for advice on the best way to import products from China, where his items are manufactured.
“It came back with a readable answer, but I see it as a baseline,” Duffy said. “It won’t do your job for you.”
Microsoft pushed back on a report Wednesday that the company lowered growth targets for artificial intelligence software sales after many of its salespeople missed those goals in the last fiscal year.
The company’s stock sank more than 2% on The Information report.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company has not lowered sales quotas or targets for its salespeople.
The sales lag occurred for Microsoft’s Foundry product, an Azure enterprise platform where companies can build and manage AI agents, according to The Information, which cited two salespeople in Azure’s cloud unit.
AI agents can carry out a series of actions for a user or organization autonomously.
Less than a fifth of salespeople in one U.S. Azure unit met the Foundry sales growth target of 50%, according to The Information.
In another unit, the quota was set to double Foundry sales, The Information reported. The quota was dropped to 50% after most salespeople didn’t meet it.
In a statement, the company said the news outlet inaccurately combined the concepts of growth and quotas.
“Aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered, as we informed them prior to publication,” a Microsoft Spokesperson said.
The AI boom has presented opportunities for businesses to add efficiencies and streamline tasks, with the companies that build these agents touting the power of the tools to take on work and allow workers to do more.
OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Salesforce, Amazon and others all have their own tools to create and manage these AI assistants.
But the adoption of these tools by traditional businesses hasn’t seen the same surge as other parts of the AI ecosystem.
The Information noted AI adoption struggles at private equity firm Carlyle last year, in which the tools wouldn’t reliably connect data from other places. The company later reduced how much it spent on the tools.
Read the full story from The Information here.
Waymo partners with Uber to bring robotaxi service to Atlanta and Austin.
Uber Technologies Inc.
Waymo on Wednesday said humans will begin test driving the Alphabet-owned company’s robotaxi vehicles in Baltimore, Pittsburgh and St. Louis.
The three cities represent the latest additions to Waymo’s quickly growing list of cities where the Google sister company is either operating its robotaxis, planning to launch service or starting to test its vehicles. That list now stands at 26 markets.
Waymo will begin manual drives in the trio of new cities this week with hopes to eventually begin serving fully-autonomous rides there, spokesperson Ethan Teicher told CNBC.
Over the past month, Waymo has been aggressively making announcements for new markets and developments at the Google sister company. This comes as tech rivals Amazon and Tesla made advancements in the robotaxi market in 2025. Amazon’s Zoox began offering free rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco, and Tesla this year launched ride-hailing service with human supervisors in the Austin and San Francisco markets.
In November, Waymo announced that it will soon begin manually driving in Minneapolis, Tampa and New Orleans. The company also added Houston, San Antonio and Orlando to its list of cities where it’ll launch service in 2026. Waymo also began offering rides on freeways in the San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix markets, and it named a new finance chief.
With more than 250,000 weekly paid trips, Waymo’s robotaxi service currently operates in Austin, the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, Atlanta and Los Angeles markets. The company in May said it had provided more than 10 million paid rides since launching in 2020.
The new cities further signal that Waymo is increasingly confident its service can work well in locations with colder weather conditions.
Technology
Security startup Verkada hits $5.8 billion valuation in latest funding round led by CapitalG
Filip Kaliszan, CEO of Verkada.
Courtesy: Verkada
Security technology startup Verkada has reached a $5.8 billion valuation after a new funding round led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s venture capital arm, announced Wednesday.
“I think Google saw the opportunity with us in the application of AI and everything we’re driving to apply AI to the physical security industry,” CEO Filip Kaliszan told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa.
The company said in a release that the investment will be used to bolster its artificial intelligence capabilities and provide liquidity.
The financing totaled $100 million, a person familiar with the terms of the round told CNBC, raising the company’s valuation by $1.3 billion from its Series E funding in February. The person asked not to be named in order to discuss details of the funding.
CapitalG also recently contributed to a $435 million fundraise for cybersecurity startup Armis in November.
The new funding comes as Verkada surpasses $1 billion in annualized bookings across 30,000 customers globally.
The company develops physical security products, including cameras, alarms and sensors, that are connected under a single cloud-based software platform.
Kaliszan said his company serves a broad span of businesses, such as retailers, government properties, schools, and transportation.
For example, TeraWatt Infrastructure, which supplies charging sites to electric vehicles like Google’s Waymo, uses Verkada technology to protect EV facilities.
In September, the company rolled out over 60 new AI features and platform updates, including tools like “AI-Powered Unified Timeline.”
The tool can automatically synthesize videos and images from several cameras into a single visual timeline, rather than requiring security teams to dig through multiple videos during an investigation.
“The genius of Filip and the team of Verkada is that they’re leveraging AI as a Rosetta Stone to really help unlock insights from cameras to help companies become safer and more efficient,” CapitalG general partner Derek Zanutto told Bosa.
By capturing over 20 million images per hour, Verkada can provide notable data like foot traffic, occupancy rates, security violations and other trends, Zanutto said.
He added that the physical security is a sleeping $60 billion market that is led by legacy hardware like “cameras that just record, not cameras that think” — a gap that Verkada is hoping to fill.
However, AI-powered technology will not necessarily replace human security guards any time soon.
“I think humans will be providing security to other humans for as long as I can think,” Kaliszan said. “But AI can empower these first responders to be more aware, to have situational knowledge, to know what to do, and in some cases, actually prevent the problems from happening.”
He pointed to the Louvre heist in October, where multiple crown jewels were robbed from the museum, as an opportunity where AI-assisted devices that could actively monitor, then immediately alert security forces, would be more effective than only physical personnel.
“If you could intervene right then, if you could know in real time that that’s happening, the potential for savings and preventing damage is tremendous,” he said.
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