Comment by ajross

> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.

That seems entirely backwards to me. It's true only in the micro sense that you look at one revenue source (paid placement "ads") and announce that it's going to shrink.

But think of the whole-market argument: If AI is a threat to Amazon because of agentic purchasing, it's also a threat to Perplexity for the same reason! Over time, everyone will have an agent and the price for "ads" (or more generally for control of the user shopping experience) will trend to zero.

Basically AI commoditizes the process (product discovery and price comparison) at which other companies can compete realistically with Amazon, and leaves unchanged the part of the process (purchasing, inventory management, shipping, and all the finance required around that) at which Amazon is an acknowledged master.

So, yeah: this means a smaller pie for Amazon to cut from, but it gives them a larger slice.