Amazon is drawing a bold new line in digital commerce—and wholesale distributors should take note.
During Amazon’s third-quarter earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy said the next great wave of artificial intelligence will take shape through autonomous digital agents that can reason, act, and transact across online ecosystems. “A lot of the future value companies will get from AI will be in the form of agents,” he said. “AWS is heavily investing in this area and well positioned to be a leader.”
For distributors, that comment marked a turning point. The ecommerce era was about digital storefronts; the agentic era will be about intelligent systems that negotiate prices, confirm inventory, and arrange delivery—often without human input.
AWS Builds the Agentic Foundation
Jassy said Amazon Web Services (AWS) is applying its original cloud playbook—modular infrastructure, developer tools, and massive computing scale—to the emerging agent economy. The company introduced two foundational services designed to make it easier to build and run production-grade agents: Strands and AgentCore.
Strands lets developers create agents from any large language model or foundation model. AgentCore provides a secure runtime environment to deploy them on a scale. Jassy said the AgentCore software development kit has been downloaded more than one million times with early adopters including Ericsson, Sony, and Cohere Health, whose medical-review agents are cutting turnaround times by 30% to 40%.
AWS is also deploying its own agents. Kiro, an agentic coding environment, drew more than 100,000 developers in its first days of preview and has processed trillions of tokens. Transform, an automation agent used for cloud migration, has saved customers 700,000 hours of manual work this year. For business users, Quick Suite aims to deliver “a consumer-AI-like experience at work,” with early customers seeing time savings of more than 80% on complex tasks.
All of it rides on AWS’s expanding compute backbone. The company added 3.8 gigawatts of data-center power in the past year and expects to double capacity again by 2027. Project Rainier, its newest U.S. cluster, includes 500,000 Trainium2 chips, training Anthropic’s next Claude models, and will surpass one million chips by year-end. AWS’s annualized revenue has climbed to $132 billion, up 20% year over year, with CFO Brian Olsavsky projecting $125 billion in 2025 capital expenditures to support AI growth and silicon development.
Amazon’s Dual Path in Agentic Commerce
Pressed on how this vision applies to retail, Jassy said Amazon will pursue a dual strategy: building its own agents and partnering with third-party ecosystems. But he argued that most current shopping agents are not yet ready for prime time. “Right now, there’s no personalization, there’s no shopping history, the delivery estimates are frequently wrong, the prices are often wrong,” he said.
Amazon’s internal development aims to fix those flaws. The company’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, already serves 250 million active customers globally. Shoppers who use Rufus are 60% more likely to complete a purchase than those who don’t, proving that conversational AI can materially lift conversion. Amazon is also testing Buy for Me, an agent that can purchase items on other merchants’ sites on a customer’s behalf.
Jassy described agents as the bridge between physical and digital shopping experiences. “If you know what you want to buy, there are few experiences better than coming to Amazon,” he said. “But if you don’t know what you want, you often want to ask questions and get help narrowing what you’re going to look for.”
The Signal for Wholesale Distributors
For wholesalers and distributors, Amazon’s agentic strategy is more than a retail experiment—it’s a preview of how procurement, quoting, and fulfillment will soon operate in B2B commerce. As buyers adopt agents that can autonomously identify suppliers, verify specs, and place orders, distributors will need to ensure their systems can talk directly to those agents.
That means every product, price, and delivery estimate must be accessible via real-time APIs and structured data models. If an agent cannot interpret a SKU or confirm availability, it will move on to another source.
The impact will be felt across four key areas:
- Product discovery: Agents will crawl structured catalogs, reading attributes, certifications, and compatibility details. Distributors with incomplete data will fall out of search visibility.
- Automated transactions: Agents will build quotes, apply negotiated pricing, and place orders automatically, requiring distributors to expose live pricing, credit, and logistics endpoints.
- Post-order service: Agents will check delivery status, initiate returns, and file claims. Systems must provide reliable data feeds for proof of delivery, RMA creation, and order history.
- Operational efficiency: The same architecture can run internally. Inside-sales or customer-service teams can use agents to recommend substitutes, track open quotes, or generate proposals instantly.
Jassy’s critique of inaccurate agents—wrong prices, bad delivery estimates—highlights the risk for distributors whose data is inconsistent. In an agent-driven marketplace, accuracy and API accessibility will define competitiveness.
A Glimpse at the Agent-Driven Marketplace
Amazon’s experience with Rufus shows how conversational AI reshapes buyer behavior. Instead of typing a search query, users describe a problem, and the agent recommends the right product—mirroring the guidance of a seasoned sales rep. Translated to B2B, procurement agents could soon analyze maintenance logs, identify needed parts, and issue purchase orders automatically.
The infrastructure for that vision already exists. AWS’s combination of Bedrock foundation models, AgentCore, and Trainium2 compute delivers both speed and cost efficiency to scale millions of agents. What’s missing now is supplier readiness—clean data, consistent APIs, and governance frameworks that allow agents to transact confidently.
The Bottom Line
Amazon’s “agentic commerce” agenda signals the next transformation in digital distribution. Where ecommerce digitized transactions, agentic systems will digitize decisions. Distributors that prepare their catalogs, pricing, and logistics data for machine consumption will be first in line for autonomous procurement traffic.
The path forward is clear: clean the data, open the APIs, evaluate agentic workflows internally, and build trust in automation. Those who act early will become the suppliers that AI agents rely on—and the winners in the next chapter of global distribution.
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