June 3 report, Amazon officially announced on Wednesday the launch of a new AI feature in its shopping app, which will display AI-generated product images below the auto-complete suggestions when users search. This feature aims to visually present different styles (such as short and long sleeves, different skirt lengths, etc.), helping consumers who find it difficult to describe their core needs with precise keywords. Clicking on the image allows users to jump to matching results through visual search.

QQ20260604-090820.jpg

This is the latest move in Amazon's ongoing AI strategy in the retail sector. Previously, the company has launched AI comment summaries, audio product summaries in podcast format, shoppable collages, and Amazon Lens Live, which supports camera scanning for visual matching. At the beginning of this month, Amazon also replaced the previous Rufus AI chatbot with Alexa for Shopping to enhance the natural language shopping experience.

Although this feature aims to lower the search barrier through multimodal interaction, it has also sparked reflection and doubt within the industry about the breadth of large model applications in e-commerce. Comments point out that generated AI images may lead to consumer misjudgments about inventory, and given that the platform already has a vast number of real product images, the actual conversion value of AI-generated images remains to be tested by the market. This attempt to introduce "virtual generation" into "physical e-commerce" marks the shift of large model applications from auxiliary tools for cost reduction and efficiency improvement to more profound but controversial interactive core areas.