Amazon.com Inc. outlined an aggressive expansion of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and “agentic” commerce tools during its fourth-quarter earnings call, signaling new competitive pressures and digital expectations for business buyers and wholesale distributors.
In the company’s Feb. 5 earnings report, Amazon said revenue for the quarter totaled $213.4 billion, a 12% increase from the same period in 2024, with operating income of $25 billion. Cloud unit Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported revenue of $35.6 billion, up 24% year over year, marking its fastest growth in 13 quarters. CEO Andy Jassy said cloud and AI investments will drive much of Amazon’s future growth.
“Our investments in artificial intelligence, AWS infrastructure, custom silicon and agentic services are designed to help customers solve real business challenges,” Jassy said on the call. “We believe every customer experience will be reinvented with AI,” said CEO Andrew Jassy.
AI Agents and Cloud Services Become Strategic Focus
Amazon’s earnings call underscored AI as a cornerstone of both cloud and e-commerce strategy.
Executives highlighted the growth of Amazon Bedrock, a platform that lets customers run and fine-tune large AI models, and SageMaker, AWS’s AI development and deployment suite. Jassy said the company has introduced tools that allow enterprises to train custom AI models on their own data at initial stages, a capability he described as a “potential game changer.”
“Customers want choice and performance,” he said. “They want stronger foundations for models that reflect their data. That’s why we built NovaForge – so companies can securely blend proprietary data in pre-training.”
AWS also touted the expansion of Trainium and Graviton custom silicon chips, which Amazon said deliver significant price-performance advantages and help lower inference costs for AI workloads. According to the company, more than 100,000 customers are using Trainium-powered Bedrock services, with Trainium2 chips offering 30% to 40% better price performance than comparable GPUs.
Agentic Commerce: From Browsing to Buying
On the retail side, Amazon emphasized enterprise-scale, AI-driven shopping assistants. The company said its AI shopping agent Rufus was used by more than 300 million customers in 2025 and boosts purchase completion rates by 60% among users.
Rufus can track prices, research items, and buy products when they match a customer’s criteria — and it now supports purchases from other online merchants, Amazon said.
“These agentic tools are early examples of how commerce will evolve,” Jassy said. “Customers will increasingly rely on agents that can navigate, compare and transact on their behalf.”
Amazon is also experimenting with partnerships and third-party agents, even as Jassy argued that retailers with richer pricing history and in-platform data may offer stronger user experiences.
Implications for Distributors
Amazon did not directly address its B2B marketplace in Friday’s earnings announcement, but its AI and cloud priorities could ripple through the industrial distribution landscape.
Industry analysts say the company’s focus on AI agents and automation points to several emerging trends:
- Automated Procurement Interfaces: If business buyers adopt AI agents for procurement, distributors must ensure product catalogs, pricing and inventory are machine-readable and accessible via APIs.
- Frictionless Reordering and Integration: AI assistants could shift purchasing away from stand-alone marketplaces to embedded workflows in enterprise systems, including ERP and procurement platforms.
- Price and Delivery Expectations: Amazon continues to push same-day and ultrafast delivery options globally. Distributors that cannot match expectations for speed, transparency and fulfillment automation risk losing share in transactional categories.
Amazon’s investments in cloud and AI tools could also help distributors accelerate internal digital transformation. AWS’s scale — now at a $142 billion annualized run rate — and tools like Bedrock and SageMaker provide infrastructure for distributors to build or adopt AI-powered forecasting, chatbots, recommendation engines and automated quoting.
Amazon also emphasized fulfillment network optimization, including expanded regionalization to reduce delivery costs and improve speed. The company said it delivered 70% more same-day orders in the U.S. in 2025 than the year prior, and expanded grocery fulfillment to more than 2,300 cities and towns.
The company plans to open more than 100 additional Whole Foods stores in the coming years and expand ultrafast delivery offerings in India, Mexico, and the UAE. These moves underscore Amazon’s strategy of blending physical and digital fulfillment — a model distribution companies have studied for years.
Amazon said it expects to invest $200 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, much of it in AWS infrastructure and AI capacity. That investment reflects confidence that demand for cloud and AI services will continue to grow rapidly.
“We are confident our investments will yield strong returns on invested capital,” CFO Brian Olsavsky said on the call. “Customers want AWS for both core and AI workloads.”
For distributors, the convergence of AI, cloud services and seamless commerce interfaces marks an inflection point. Companies that harness these technologies to streamline ordering, improve data quality, and automate customer engagement could gain a competitive advantage as the era of agentic commerce takes shape.
Do not miss any content from Distribution Strategy Group. Join our list.
