Amazon licenses AI shopping technology to retailers, signs Kate Spade parent Tapestry as early adopter

Amazon has spent years building AI tools to run its own massive retail operation. Now it wants to sell that playbook to everyone else.

The company is offering its AI shopping technology to other retailers through Amazon Web Services, essentially letting competitors build their own AI-powered retail tools on Amazon’s infrastructure. Tapestry Inc., the parent company of Coach and Kate Spade New York, is among the first major brands to go deep on the offering.

What Tapestry is actually building

Tapestry’s implementation gives a concrete picture of what “AI shopping technology” looks like in practice. The luxury retailer is using nearly 20 AWS services, with Amazon Bedrock, the company’s generative AI platform, serving as the foundation.

Two internal applications stand out. The first, called “Tell Rexy,” is a feedback collection system deployed across North American Coach stores. It gathered roughly 30,000 pieces of associate feedback within its first year of operation. The second tool, “Ask Rexy,” functions as a chatbot that surfaces insights from that feedback data. Store associates can query it for answers rather than waiting for a manager to relay information down the chain.

Beyond these two tools, Tapestry built an enterprise knowledge management chatbot that went from concept to deployment in just four months. It currently serves about 300 employees across six teams.

Tapestry plans to extend the associate feedback application to Kate Spade New York stores next, signaling confidence that the tools work well enough to scale across its brand portfolio.

The bigger AWS retail play

AWS also powers its Just Walk Out technology, the cashierless checkout system originally built for Amazon Go stores, which is now deployed at more than 180 third-party locations worldwide.

No specific financial terms have been disclosed for any of these licensing arrangements. Neither Amazon nor Tapestry has revealed deal valuations, subscription costs, or revenue projections tied to the partnership.

Why this matters for investors and the retail sector

For Tapestry specifically, the speed of development is the interesting metric. Building and deploying an enterprise chatbot in four months, collecting 30,000 feedback data points in a year, these are the kinds of operational improvements that compound over time. Whether that translates to margin improvement is the open question investors should track in coming earnings reports.

The absence of disclosed financial terms is also telling. Amazon may be prioritizing market share and ecosystem lock-in over short-term licensing revenue, a familiar playbook from the early days of AWS itself.

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