Anthropic Gives Retailers Blueprint for AI Shopping Agents

Anthropic is giving retailers a set of blueprints to build artificial intelligence agents that can help shoppers find products and assist merchants with tasks including inventory, pricing and marketing, as retailers prepare for the holiday shopping season.

The AI company announced the blueprint Wednesday (Sept. 2). Reuters reported that the initiative comes as shoppers increasingly use AI to compare prices, check product availability and get recommendations. Adobe Analytics said last month that visits to retail sites driven by artificial intelligence were converting at a 60% higher rate than traffic from other sources, according to Reuters.

Anthropic said its blueprint includes working reference implementations for both shopping and merchant agents across retail, travel, telecom and ticketing platforms. The company also is providing a Claude Code plugin and said the blueprint can be deployed through the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry or Google Cloud Vertex AI.

The shopping agent is designed to operate inside a retailer’s app or website. It can search product catalogs, assemble multiple items, use customer preferences to tailor recommendations, display comparisons and carts within a conversation and hand completed carts to checkout. It also can answer customer-service questions about orders, returns, exchanges and refund policies, Anthropic said.

The merchant agent is aimed at store operators. It can answer questions about sales performance, monitor inventory and flag potential problems, recommend pricing and promotions based on sales history and draft marketing campaigns. Anthropic said a person must approve changes before they go live.

The move comes as Anthropic expands its push into enterprise AI and works to make Claude more accessible to businesses.