Amazon’s Rufus AI Chatbot Helps Drive Black Friday Sales and Engagement, Data Shows

Amazon's Rufus, an artificial intelligence (AI) shopping assistant, is now helping drive sales on the platform. As per new data, on Black Friday, the e-commerce giant's shopping platform witnessed a strong uptick when it came to shopping sessions with Rufus as well as shopping sessions that led to purchase. The data also highlights the shift in users' preference, as interacting with an agentic AI chatbot to help in shopping processes appears to be growing popular. Notably, ahead of Black Friday, Google, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Microsoft also released AI-powered shopping tools.

Rufus Drives Sales on Amazon, Data Says

Ian Simpson, Senior Vice President, Innovation and Strategy at Sensor Tower, shared company data in a post on LinkedIn, highlighting that Rufus played an important role in driving both engagement (shopping session duration) on Amazon's e-commerce platform and sales. Based on the data, shopping sessions in the US on the Amazon app with Rufus saw an uptick by 86 percent when compared to a non-sale day just two weeks before that.

In the same duration, shopping sessions without Rufus just marked an increase of 16 percent. Of course, the data does not paint the full picture since Rufus' adoption is not very large, and the uptick percentages could mean little when it comes to absolute increases. However, it does highlight that users are starting to use the AI assistant.

Notably, total sessions with Rufus on Amazon was noted at 38 percent, or a little over one-third of the shoppers. This is a slight increase compared to Prime Day sale, where Rufus was used in 34 percent of all sessions.

Another interesting data shared by Simpson is sessions that led to a purchase. The difference between non-Rufus sessions leading to purchase and Rufus-based sessions leading to purchase was as high as 75 percent. This is a far more important metric, because it shows that Rufus is not only an engagement or interaction tool, but it is also helping in conversions.

Separately, Adobe Analytics also reported a significant increase in AI-driven e-commerce traffic during the holiday season. Between November 1 and November 30, traffic from AI sources to e-ecommerce platforms is said to have increased 770 percent year-on-year, with 74.4 percent of those coming from desktop devices and 25.6 percent redirected on a smartphone or tablet.

However, despite the positive data, Simpson advises tempered expectations. In a separate post, he said, “My bet is consumers are using Rufus more as advanced search and less as an agentic shopper. Conversions do seem to be higher with Rufus but that could be because it's driving better search results vs radically changing the shopping experience.”