The independent sellers in the Amazon store tend to share a common constraint. It isn’t a shortage of ideas or ambition. It’s a shortage of time. As a business grows into new categories, countries, and hires, the day fills up with the work of simply keeping it running.
That was the throughline at Amazon Accelerate 2026, the company’s annual seller conference, held in Seattle this September. Over two days, Amazon made a single argument: that a new layer of artificial intelligence (AI), built for the business of selling, can take on the operational load that has historically kept small businesses small.
Mary Beth Westmoreland, vice president of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, framed it through a selling partner named Charlene, a crafting-supplies owner she was paired with through a program that embeds senior Amazon leaders with sellers.
“Charlene wanted to spend less time managing the day-to-day operations and more time finding new products and connecting with her customers,” Westmoreland said.
More than 60 percent of sales in the store come from independent sellers, she noted, who employ more than two million people in the U.S. alone.
Nearly 4,000 selling partners came together in Seattle to learn, connect, and grow their businesses at Amazon Accelerate 2026.
A partner that works while the owner is off the clock
The everyday face of that idea is Seller Assistant, the free conversational AI tool inside Amazon’s Seller Central dashboard, first debuted at Accelerate a year ago. The change this year: it is less of a chatbot that answers questions and more of a system that monitors a business continuously and acts on the owner’s behalf within limits they set.
“Your business doesn’t live in one dashboard. Everything you do is connected,” said Chris Jones, director of Seller Assistant. “So we continue building Seller Assistant to think that way, too.”
It watches for shifts a busy owner would miss and arrives with a plan rather than waiting to be asked, and it remembers past decisions, so a product test that failed months ago informs today’s advice. Jones said sellers currently act on its recommendations about 90 percent of the time.
Sellers choose whether it surfaces insights, drafts actions, or acts on its own. This was a point Amazon stressed repeatedly, an implicit answer to the worry that autonomous software acts without accountability.
Joy Chang, director of Support Experience at Selling Partner Support, described a model in which the seller defines the job and sets the guardrails, with nothing happening without approval and every action logged.
Joy Chang, Director of Support Experience, takes the Accelerate 2026 mainstage to unveil Seller Assistant’s built-in automations — from pricing adjustments that run in the background to custom workflows that learn your business and plan for events like Black Friday, all from one conversation.
Smarter advertising, in more places
This year, Amazon put the same AI that runs the rest of Seller Assistant to work on advertising. The assistant now sees a seller’s whole business, including listings, inventory, existing campaigns, catalog trends, and draws on all of it the moment a seller asks a simple question: “Am I ready to launch?” said Muthu Muthukrishnan, vice president of Sponsored Products and Brands.
Instead of the seller stitching together separate pages, the assistant checks whether each product’s listing and inventory are actually ready to advertise, flags what needs fixing, and then drafts Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns the seller can approve in a keystroke or open in the ad console to fine-tune.
The bigger shift is what happens after a campaign goes live. A new auto-optimization capability keeps working while the seller is doing something else: adding search terms that are performing, pausing those that aren’t, and holding every bid under a maximum the seller sets.
In early results, Amazon said, new campaigns using it saw a first sale 40 percent faster. Sellers can also feed in what they already know about their own customers through a new tool called Ads Data Manager, offered free, which connects that first-party data to their Amazon campaigns. Advertisers who do, Muthukrishnan said, see 30 percent better returns on ad spend.
The seller stays in charge. “You can always see exactly what changed and why, and make any adjustments,” Muthukrishnan said. “You are in control, always.”
Keep running
Claire O’Donnell, VP of Selling Partner Trust & Store Integrity, takes the Amazon Accelerate 2026 stage. Last year, Amazon’s systems automatically confirmed compliance for over 8 million products — and they’re on pace to double that by the end of 2026.
Some of the most consequential news was the least flashy. Amazon is building more due process into Account Health with a program called Listing Protection, which Claire O’Donnell, vice president of Selling Partner Trust and Store Integrity, said will reach all Account Health Assurance sellers in the U.S. by year-end and worldwide in 2027.
When a violation is flagged, the listing stays live while the seller resolves it, with clear steps and a way to challenge errors. “In most cases, your listing stays active until we issue a decision, and your business keeps running while we review,” O’Donnell said.
Separately, Amazon said it eliminated 37 million reasons for sellers to contact support in the past year, the most in its history.
Intelligence that travels
Amazon extended the assistant beyond its own walls. Through a new plugin, sellers can connect their Seller Central data to outside AI tools they already use, starting with Anthropic’s Claude and Amazon’s own Quick in the U.S., carrying their selling data and curated skills like reading sales trends and optimizing listings into whatever tool they prefer.
Growing the business
“Customers aren’t typing a product name into a search bar anymore. They’re coming to Amazon for help, ideas, and inspiration.” Natalie Zmuda reveals how Alexa for Shopping, used by 350M+ customers in the last 12 months, is changing the way shoppers find your products.
If day one was about reducing the work of running a business, day two was about widening the runway to grow it.
How shoppers find products. Natalie Zmuda, who leads AI shopping, said more than 350 million customers used Alexa for Shopping in the past year to describe problems in plain language rather than type keywords. This is a shift she argued rewards sellers who clearly explain what a product does over those who game search terms. Customers who shop that way spend over 40 percent more per order.
Business-to-business (B2B)
Amazon pushed into B2B, where it argues the economics favor prepared small sellers: business customers place orders nearly two and a half times larger than consumers, convert at three times the rate, and return at less than half the frequency.
New Amazon Business Deals lets sellers set volume pricing visible only to business buyers.
“For the first time, you can create exclusive incentives and pricing for business buyers,” said Shelley Salomon, vice president of Amazon Business.
Financing
Amazon is opening its lending program to every seller by year-end, dropping the required invitation, and added partners including SBA-backed loans up to $5 million, a substantive change for businesses that struggle to secure conventional capital.
What to launch
New AI tools help sellers decide what to sell next, matching demand signals to a catalog so a business’s next product rests on data rather than instinct.
“My team is my family, some close friends, and a team member who never sleeps, an AI assistant I built myself. Her name is Lisa.” Richard Brown, founder of sneaker care brand Proof Culture, demos how he connected his entire business inside Amazon Quick using the Selling Partner plugin.
Supply chain
Amazon opened the logistics network it built for itself to outside businesses. Amazon Supply Chain Services bundles freight, storage, distribution, fulfillment, and shipping into pieces any business can adopt. As Peter Larsen, vice president of Amazon Supply Chain Services, put it, it gives sellers “the flexibility to adopt what you need and leave behind what you don’t.”
Going global
Amazon reframed international selling as Global From Day One, the default rather than an opt-in step. Piyush Saraogi, who leads the effort, said sellers in more than one country earn about 70 percent more on average, yet only about 30 percent sell abroad. A “Sell Globally” tool matches worldwide demand to a catalog, and warehouses near sellers’ factories cut storage costs up to 45 percent.
Every channel
A new Multichannel Selling tool lets sellers manage catalog, orders, and inventory across Walmart, eBay, TikTok Shop, and Shopify from inside Seller Central.
The finale
“How do you grow? New products. New customers. New countries.” Mary Beth Westmoreland lays out the roadmap at Amazon Accelerate, from Seller Assistant to multichannel selling, it’s all about putting intelligence to work for sellers.
Amazon closed on Prime Air, framing speed as a sales driver.
VP David Carbon said drones now average 39 minutes from click to delivery at the fastest sites and will reach hundreds of U.S. cities and towns by year-end.
Taken together, the announcements sketch a consistent thesis: the historical limits on a small business, such as time, bandwidth, capacity, can be eased by AI that understands the business and does some of the work.
Westmoreland closed on the relationship, not the technology. “Amazon does not exist without the sellers in this room,” she said. “We do not always get it right. But we keep showing up, and so do you. That is the deal.”