AI, expansion and Amazon-as-a-Service: Everything we learned at Amazon Accelerate 2025

We’re back from yet another fantastic, instructive few days at Amazon Accelerate 2025.

Held in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, Accelerate is a real business show – you learn about Amazon from the best, whether that’s in the CEO’s opening remarks, panel sessions by partners and agencies, or in one-to-one practical sessions with Amazon’s own experts. 

As an Amazon agency, we learn loads from the show, and relish the opportunity to meet clients and partners alike. 

Here are the big learnings from this year’s show. 

Andy Jassy, CEO: ‘We value sellers’

Amazon used the show to make sellers feel valued. 

Opening the show, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy praised small and independent sellers as VIP partners in Amazon’s operation.

He spoke to Amazon’s VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Services Dharmesh Mehta about these partnerships, calling them “wildly important and strategic to all of us, and to me.”

He also highlighted the benefits of selling through Amazon, saying: “Instead of having to find a way to somehow be able to spend a ginormous amount of money on advertising and then hoping you could attract [shoppers] to your store or your storefront, [independent sellers] get to use Amazon as their marketing tool, and their focus groups, and national distribution.”

e-Comas’s founder and CEO Jérôme de Guigné says: “Andy Jassy’s presentation was a CEO masterclass from my point of view.

“He appealed to thousands of Amazon’s key customers – small and independent sellers – with solid evidence that Amazon values them as partners, and that it will keep making selling globally easier for them.

“He also showed you can’t fight gravity: you need to follow the market and how business is flowing, which is why they opened Amazon to sellers all these years ago. 

“Everything Amazon does is to help scale, and be resold elsewhere. They realised early that they had not built things in a simple way, but they are now. 

“That includes ‘Amazon as a Service’: Amazon is opening up completely to other platforms for its fulfilment, shipping and ads services, a massive change from five years ago. This means Amazon’s companies and services are selling beyond the Amazon marketplace, fuelling huge growth and generating revenue from its very competitors.

“Amazon will be unreachable if they keep fostering these values at scale. They’re an inspiration.”

Growth of AI

Andy Jassy also said AI is going “to be the most transformative technology of our lifetime”, which set the tone for the many AI innovations announced at the show, including upgrades to Seller Assistant, Enhance My Listing, and A+ Content.

Amazon claims 1.3 million sellers so far have used its genAI tools, including automatically generated photos, descriptions and suggested keywords for listings. 

But its new agentic AI tools go even further: In Creative Studio, they effectively give sellers an ‘assistant’ that they can collaborate with to research products, draft storyboards, and generate full video ad campaigns. “So rather than clicking a button, you’re actually able to have a natural-language conversation with a creative partner that is working with you to help you achieve your goals,” said Jay Richman, VP of Creative Products and Technology for Amazon Ads.

Meanwhile, in the upgraded Seller Assistant, sellers can actively monitor inventory levels and anticipate shifts in product demand, with recommendations given on pricing and restocking. They can approve the tool to take action for them – preparing shipments and adjusting listings automatically. 

‘Let AI act for you’ 

The new tools are powered with Amazon’s Nova AI foundation model and Anthropic’s Claude 4, combined with real sellers’ sales data. 

However, speaking at the show, Amazon’s Dharmesh Mehta highlighted that Amazon takes privacy very seriously, and AI models are not trained with seller-specific data, so no confidential information is available to sellers’ competitors. Trust is paramount: Amazon wants sellers to be “comfortable letting the AI act on their behalf.”

Jérôme says: “Amazon is investing massively in AI to level the ground and democratise selling online, with easy creative, support on handling your account, inventory management, and more. 

“Of course it will take time for it to work well, but we can already see the impact: small agile structures can reduce their cost and go-to-market time – taking immediate advantage over their competition. 

“A key question, especially for large organisations, is: how can you adapt in a start-up mode to be able to change fast, learn fast and apply fast? 

“For smaller brands the potential is huge and it will be interesting to see how this will play out in the best sellers in the years to come.”

Global expansion

One thing you’ll never be able to fully automate is global expansion: human expertise will always be needed. That was one of the themes of AVASK’s speaker session at the show, featuring e-Comas’s own Jérôme de Guigné.

The session, titled ‘Beyond the US: Unlocking Europe’s Billion-Dollar Opportunity’, was jointly hosted by Jérôme and AVASK’s Alexandra Ramirez, exploring how US sellers can expand into the UK and EU eCommerce markets – and why they should. 

Chiefly, that’s because these markets represent over 500 million potential customers; because eCommerce revenue in Europe is projected to grow to over $565 billion by 2029; and because there’s less competition in many categories compared to the US.

Jérôme and Alexandra also talked about the different eCommerce markets and top-selling categories in each country, and other practical considerations, like logistics and compliance.

Melanie Katsaris, CEO and Co-founder of AVASK, says: “I’ve been attending Amazon Accelerate since its very first year but this year felt different.

“The level of interest in global expansion was unlike anything we’ve seen before. Over 400 entrepreneurs stopped by to learn more about scaling internationally.

“The reason is clear: with the tariff squeeze and growing US competition, sellers are now actively seeking new opportunities. Europe is becoming the obvious next step – especially with the launch of the new Amazon Ireland marketplace.

“The appetite for expansion has never been stronger. The real question is: who will take the leap first?”