Amazon's new AI tool makes shopping decisions simpler with just one tap

Help Me Decide blends personal data with AI to reduce decision fatigue for shoppers overwhelmed by choice

Faced with hundreds of near-identical product listings and an overabundance of options, modern online shopping can feel more like a chore than a convenience. Enter Amazon's new AI-powered feature, Help Me Decide, which aims to restore simplicity and confidence to your digital trolley. Already rolled out to millions of U.S. mobile users, this clever tool combines personal browsing history, preferences, and behavioural cues to recommend a single, well-matched product with clear reasons why it’s the right pick.

Cutting Through the Clutter

Amazon's sprawling marketplace is a blessing and a curse. Choice abounds, but it can paralyse rather than empower. Help Me Decide steps in when it senses a shopper may be wavering—perhaps after browsing five nearly identical camping tents or scrolling through endless wireless headphones.

Rather than forcing the customer to weigh specs, scroll through reviews, and Google comparisons, the AI quietly does the legwork. It analyses your recent activity, correlates it with previous purchases and preferences, then presents a single recommended product alongside a clear explanation. Budget-friendly and upgraded alternatives are offered too, should you want options.

AI That Understands You

This new tool isn’t flying blind. It draws on a stack of Amazon technologies—including large language models, Bedrock, SageMaker, and OpenSearch—to build a nuanced picture of who you are as a shopper. Someone who just bought kids’ sleeping bags and hiking boots, for example, might be steered toward a family-sized tent rather than a solo ultralight option.

"Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after you've been browsing several similar items," explains Daniel Lloyd, Amazon’s vice president of Personalisation. "It gives you confidence in your purchase decision."

The Psychology of Just One Choice

Amazon’s move taps into an emerging behavioural science principle: people don’t want more choice, they want smarter choice. As McKinsey has reported, personalised experiences can increase customer satisfaction by as much as 20% and reduce time spent making decisions by up to 40%.

By offering a single recommendation with a transparent rationale, Help Me Decide transforms a potentially frustrating moment into one of reassurance. It quietly answers the shopper's inner monologue: “Is this the right one?”

From Passive Browsing to Guided Discovery

Help Me Decide joins a growing family of AI-driven shopping features designed to shift Amazon from a passive marketplace into an intuitive shopping assistant. Other tools include:

• Rufus, a conversational AI assistant that answers product questions and helps with comparisons
• Shopping Guides, which curate product advice from experts across categories
• Interests, an ongoing AI prompt that surfaces new product ideas based on your declared passions

Each of these leans on AI not for the sake of it, but to quietly reduce friction and improve shopper confidence. Help Me Decide simply takes this one step further by offering clarity when it matters most.

A Glimpse of AI Retail to Come

Currently available on iOS, Android, and Amazon’s mobile site in the US, the tool is expected to expand further once tested at scale. If successful, it could reshape how retailers think about the customer journey—less about endless browsing, more about gentle guidance.

For APAC markets, where mobile-first retail is king and superapps dominate, this kind of contextual AI guidance could prove even more transformative. Countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, where consumers often comparison-shop across several apps, might particularly benefit from a single tap solution that knows you better than you know yourself. This is a prime example of how AI will add nearly US$1 trillion to Southeast Asia's economy by 2030.

Could AI that decides for you be the future of frictionless retail in Asia? Or do shoppers still want the final say? Tell us how you feel about having a virtual shopping twin.