Amazon parcels are prepared for delivery at Amazon’s Robotic Fulfillment Centre.
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Amazon is rolling out an artificial intelligence tool designed to help third-party sellers quickly resolve issues with their accounts and fetch sales and inventory data.
The company said Thursday that it’s launching the product, called Amelia, in beta for select U.S. sellers, before introducing it more broadly later this year. Amazon describes it as an “all-in-one, generative-AI based selling expert,” and is making it accessible through Seller Central, the internal dashboard for third-party merchants.
Amelia is the latest generative AI tool that Amazon has brought to market in the past year as it seeks to capitalize on the hype sparked by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company has introduced an AI-powered shopping assistant named Rufus, a chatbot for businesses dubbed Q and Bedrock, a generative AI service for cloud customers.
Amazon also plans to upgrade its Alexa voice assistant with generative AI features, CNBC previously reported, and the company has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI competitor Anthropic, its largest venture deal to date.
CEO Andy Jassy told investors earlier this year that the “generative AI opportunity” is almost unprecedented and that increased capital spending is necessary to take advantage of it.
“I don’t know if any of us has seen a possibility like this in technology in a really long time, for sure since the cloud, perhaps since the internet,” Jassy said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call in April.
Andy Jassy on stage at the 2022 New York Times DealBook in New York City, November 30, 2022.
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Google and Microsoft have introduced rival products to try to ensure their relevance in a market that’s predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
AI has also become more prevalent across Amazon’s e-commerce platform. The company now displays AI-generated summaries of product reviews and it’s launched AI features for third-party sellers that can help them write listings and generate photos for ads.
Amazon also said Thursday it’s launching tools that let sellers create AI-generated video ads and use AI to write product listings in bulk based on their entire catalog. The company said it’s beginning to use generative AI to show personalized product recommendations and listings based on a user’s shopping history. For instance, Amazon would show the term “gluten free” in the description for a box of cereal if a shopper typically searches for products with that phrase.
Amazon made the announcements at its annual conference for sellers hosted in Seattle. Third-party sellers are the heartbeat of Amazon’s dominant e-commerce business. Since about 2017, they’ve accounted for at least half of all goods sold on the site. In the second quarter of this year, that number swelled to 61%.
Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide selling partner services, told CNBC in an interview that a growing number of merchants are using its AI services. More than 400,000 of Amazon’s millions of third-party sellers have used its AI listing tool, up from 200,000 in June, he said.
With Amelia, Amazon is counting on generative AI to help with a key issue for third-party merchants — account troubleshooting. The company has sprawling teams that help sellers resolve account suspensions and deal with inventory issues, as well as build their business on the site. Merchants have long complained about the difficultly with getting swift resolution or reaching a human when unforeseen issues surface with their accounts.
The company said Amelia can offer help investigating an account issue and, in the future, will be able to “solve the problem on the seller’s behalf.” Mehta described how instead of filling out a form for missing inventory, a seller could ask Amelia to file a claim for them or the tool could resolve the issue automatically.
“There are going to be places where, hey, instead of chatting with seller support or getting on the phone with someone, maybe Amelia is able to do that and do that faster,” Mehta said. “I don’t need to send an email to someone and wait for a response.”
Amazon said Amelia uses Bedrock, a software tool that lets users access large language models from Amazon and other companies like Anthropic and Stability AI. Mehta said Amelia is trained on public data from the web, along with information pulled from Amazon seller resources, FAQs and other public-facing websites.
Mehta said the model isn’t trained on seller-specific data, which is closely guarded.
Amazon said the tool uses retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, a popular AI industry framework that combines generative AI with long-established methods of information retrieval. It allows the pulling of certain seller-specific information from Amazon’s internal systems without storing it or including it in model training data.
TikTok’s grip on the short-form video market is tightening, and the world’s biggest tech platforms are racing to catch up.
Since launching globally in 2016, ByteDance-owned TikTok has amassed over 1.12 billion monthly active users worldwide, according to Backlinko. American users spend an average of 108 minutes per day on the app, according to Apptoptia.
TikTok’s success has reshaped the social media landscape, forcing competitors like Meta and Google to pivot their strategies around short-form video. But so far, experts say that none have matched TikTok’s algorithmic precision.
“It is the center of the internet for young people,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at Emarketer. “It’s where they go for entertainment, news, trends, even shopping. TikTok sets the tone for everyone else.”
Platforms like Meta‘s Instagram Reels and Google’s YouTube Shorts have expanded aggressively, launching new features, creator tools and even considering separate apps just to compete. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, traditionally a professional networking site, is the latest to experiment with TikTok-style feeds. But with TikTok continuing to evolve, adding features like e-commerce integrations and longer videos, the question remains whether rivals can keep up.
“I’m scrolling every single day. I doom scroll all the time,” said TikTok content creator Alyssa McKay.
But there may a dark side to this growth.
As short-form content consumption soars, experts warn about shrinking attention spans and rising mental-health concerns, particularly among younger users. Researchers like Dr. Yann Poncin, associate professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University, point to disrupted sleep patterns and increased anxiety levels tied to endless scrolling habits.
“Infinite scrolling and short-form video are designed to capture your attention in short bursts,” Dr. Poncin said. “In the past, entertainment was about taking you on a journey through a show or story. Now, it’s about locking you in for just a few seconds, just enough to feed you the next thing the algorithm knows you’ll like.”
Despite sky-high engagement, monetizing short videos remains an uphill battle. Unlike long-form YouTube content, where ads can be inserted throughout, short clips offer limited space for advertisers. Creators, too, are feeling the squeeze.
“It’s never been easier to go viral,” said Enberg. “But it’s never been harder to turn that virality into a sustainable business.”
Last year, TikTok generated an estimated $23.6 billion in ad revenues, according to Oberlo, but even with this growth, many creators still make just a few dollars per million views. YouTube Shorts pays roughly four cents per 1,000 views, which is less than its long-form counterpart. Meanwhile, Instagram has leaned into brand partnerships and emerging tools like “Trial Reels,” which allow creators to experiment with content by initially sharing videos only with non-followers, giving them a low-risk way to test new formats or ideas before deciding whether to share with their full audience. But Meta told CNBC that monetizing Reels remains a work in progress.
While lawmakers scrutinize TikTok’s Chinese ownership and explore potential bans, competitors see a window of opportunity. Meta and YouTube are poised to capture up to 50% of reallocated ad dollars if TikTok faces restrictions in the U.S., according to eMarketer.
Watch the video to understand how TikTok’s rise sparked a short form video race.
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
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Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
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Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.