The News
Amazon is giving its third-party sellers two AI agents to help plan their inventory. One plans what to ship into Amazon’s warehouses, while the other deals with stock that has sat there too long.
Both sit inside Seller Assistant, the AI tool in Seller Central. Amazon says they flag what needs attention, explain why and show the data behind each suggestion.
Sunny Jain, who runs Fulfillment by Amazon worldwide, explained the idea at Amazon’s Accelerate seller conference this week. “The vision here is that you’ve got a supply chain planner inside of Seller Assistant, which will make the decisions you need to make much faster,” he told Supply Chain Dive.
Amazon also opened the tool to outside AI. Sellers can now use Seller Assistant from Amazon Quick. US sellers can also try it from Anthropic’s Claude, in a beta.
Why It Matters
Inventory planners now have to decide how much of their planning to hand to Amazon. Three calls are on the table:
Inbound: how many units to send, and when.
Placement: whether to accept Amazon’s choice of warehouses.
Old stock: whether to cut the price, pull it out or liquidate it.
Each of these calls has an Amazon fee attached. Inside Seller Central, the agents work from Amazon data. A seller’s other sales channels, own warehouse and cash position stay out of the plan, unless the seller pulls them together in an outside tool through the plugin.
How It Works
Sellers give the agent instructions in plain words and set limits on what it can do. It then watches the account day and night, even when the seller is offline.
Sellers also pick how far it goes. The agent can just make suggestions, or it can take actions that the seller reviews and approves first, with every action logged.
The plugin keeps that approval step. Kin Lane, an API analyst who looked inside it, counted 11 skills, including “the full FBA inbound workflow” and “stockout prevention.” He found that “write actions are always drafted for approval,” so any change waits for the seller’s yes.
Three Amazon fees decide what each call costs:
Placement: Amazon charges per unit to spread stock across warehouses near shoppers. The fee is zero if the seller accepts Amazon’s split across several warehouses. It rises as the seller picks fewer, with one warehouse costing the most.
Low stock: a fee kicks in when a product has less than 28 days of supply, measured on both its last 30 and last 90 days of sales. Stock that Amazon’s AWD warehouses restock automatically can get a waiver.
Old stock: anything held more than 181 days pays a monthly surcharge on top of storage. Removing, destroying or liquidating stock costs a fee per item.
The first two fees push sellers to send more stock in, while the third punishes stock that sits. Planning what to send and planning what to clear are one decision about how much to hold.
The chart below follows one unit through FBA and marks which agent weighs each fee.
Last Time
Seller Assistant has made these kinds of suggestions for a year. Since last year’s Accelerate, it has flagged slow-moving stock before long-term storage fees hit, suggested keeping, discounting or removing it, and drafted shipment plans from sales patterns.
This year, those jobs became named agents that run on the seller’s standing rules. Sellers can also reach them from outside tools.
Amazon has also taken over a seller setting before. This summer it started setting handling times itself when a seller’s stated times were longer than how fast they shipped. Sellers could not opt out. One complained on Amazon's forums that they get penalized whichever way they set them.
Amazon’s fees shaped these calls before the agents did. When Amazon added the placement and low-stock fees in 2024, top sellers told Fortune the fees were pushing them toward AWD, Amazon’s own storage service.
“It’s very clear they are carrot-and-stick-ing us into using AWD,” said one apparel seller with eight-figure sales. Amazon said the fees brought what sellers pay closer to its real costs.
What’s Next
The Claude plugin is in beta for US sellers, with other countries to follow. Amazon is also giving sellers a free 12-month Quick Plus subscription through December. It says the agents will grow into “a more personalized advisor across every part of a seller’s global operations.”
Separately, the FTC’s antitrust case over how Amazon ties Prime to its fulfillment service goes to trial in Seattle in March 2027, GeekWire reported.
