A chatbot made Amazon $12 billion last year.

Not a new product line. Not a new flashy campaign.

An AI chatbot called Rufus.

So forget AI productivity and AI workflows.

AI is now a revenue machine 💵.

On their Q4 2025 earnings calls, Amazon and Walmart dropped a signal that every marketer should pay attention to.

Amazon said its AI assistant Rufus drove nearly $12B in incremental sales. Rufus users were 60% more likely to complete a purchase.

Walmart said its AI assistant Sparky users place orders with 35% higher average order value.

Same customers.
Same products.
Same prices.

Just an AI assistant in the middle.

+60% purchase completion. +35% order value.

Yes, $12B is still small versus Amazon's ~$588B in non-AWS revenue.

But it's already significant.

For giants like Amazon and Walmart, this makes perfect sense.

Massive catalogues -> massive training data.
Millions of SKUs -> endless product questions

AI assistants are a no-brainer.

But their success shouldn't trigger FOMO in smaller merchants.

Not everyone is Amazon or Walmart.

If you can build your own Rufus in-house, great.

But most companies can't and probably shouldn't try.

The smarter move is to embrace AI traffic and referrals from generalist bots like ChatGPT.
Steer the conversations, build a native app.

Don't forget, ChatGPT is used by roughly 12% of the world's population!

It's a gold mine.

Don't fight the shift. Ride it.

The commercial opportunity is too big to ignore.

Chart courtesy of Claude.