AJ Dudon sat in the audience on Wednesday morning and watched Amazon rebuild the way sellers run their businesses. By the time the lights came up, he had a name for it.
“I think internally, I could call it COO, my Chief Operating Officer,” said Dudon, owner of All-Fit Automotive. “And maybe that would even be short-selling the value of Seller Assistant.”
Dudon manufactures and sells automotive accessories in the Amazon store. His business has doubled every year since he attended his first Accelerate, Amazon’s annual seller conference, in 2022. Every year, Amazon uses the conference to show sellers what its product teams have been building for them. This year, at the Seattle Convention Center, thousands of sellers packed into the main stage hall to hear how Amazon would be helping sellers grow their businesses with ease.
Dudon was sitting with Laura Lady, who started FryAway with $2,000 and now sells her cooking oil solidifier in five countries through the Amazon store, and Rebecca Quirk, director of Amazon for Wallaroo Hat Company, a woman-founded business based in Boulder, Colorado, that has been making UPF 30+ sun-protective hats for more than 25 years.
All three had just watched Amazon announce major upgrades to Seller Assistant, the conversational agentic AI tool inside Amazon’s Seller Central dashboard turning it into a single intelligence that now connects sales, inventory, advertising, and compliance across a seller’s entire business. It draws on over 100 seller metrics, orchestrates complex workflows with hundreds of steps, and hundreds of thousands of resources every time it works with a seller. It powers a redesigned Seller Central built around connected, intelligent workflows, and a new visual workspace called Canvas. Together, they represent the biggest upgrade in how sellers manage their Amazon business in a decade.
AJ Dudon of All-Fit Automotive at Amazon Accelerate 2026 in Seattle. His business has doubled every year since his first Accelerate, and he already has a name for the new Seller Assistant, “I would call it COO.”
“It knows my business now”
The keynote opened with a story. Westmoreland described her year-long partnership with a seller named Charlene, who runs a crafting supplies business that allows her to live near her aging mom. After two decades of running her own business, Charlene had one request. She wanted to spend less time managing day-to-day operations and more time finding new products and connecting with customers.
“That echoes what I hear from so many of you,” Westmoreland told the audience. “You are running incredible businesses. You are making thousands of decisions a week, juggling sales and inventory and advertising and compliance, and somehow still finding time to think about what comes next.”
“What sellers have told Amazon is clear,” she said. “Connect the dots for me. Understand my business. Give me insights and a next step. Help me spend my time on the work that actually grows this thing.”
Then the team demonstrated what they built in response. Using a fictional seller named Jordan, director Chris Jones walked through a morning where Seller Assistant surfaced a category opportunity, spotted that customers buying Jordan’s planters were also shopping for vases, recommended bundling the two together, and built a full Q4 scenario plan. And it did it all in under 10 minutes.
The audience reacted when the system connected products Jordan hadn’t thought to pair, knew they preferred to start small, and built the promotion around both.
“We all have our own internal daily checks,” Dudon said after the session. “Truly customizing your dashboard to display the internal levers important to your daily tasks is a total game changer,” he added. That was his favorite announcement of the morning.
Two hours back every morning
Dudon called it his COO. Quirk measured it in hours.
“I’m getting back almost two hours every morning,” she said. Before the new dashboards, her routine was downloading reports, building her own charts, and walking them over to her inventory team. Now the team pulls up the data themselves. “They can come to me with their suggestions. There’s a lot more proactive activity happening across all of our team.”
The shift wasn’t just about speed. It was about what her team does with the time. “The foundation’s already in place so the team can all be curious at the jump instead of trying to understand how to build that first,” she said. “Curiosity is what keeps businesses alive. So, we’re back to being curious again.”
Lady recognized something else. She pays for dashboards across multiple platforms and doesn’t have time to check them all. “Having Amazon bring all of this into one central hub is definitely going to be a time saver.”
Rebecca Quirk, director of Amazon for Wallaroo Hat Company, a Boulder-based maker of UPF 30+ sun-protective hats, at Amazon Accelerate 2026 in Seattle.
The intelligence goes everywhere
Director of Selling Control Divisional Services, Katrina Shackelford announced the Amazon Selling Partner plugin for Quick, and the Amazon Selling Partner plugin for Claude, which lets sellers link their selling account directly to external AI tools, giving those tools access to their full Amazon catalog, real-time metrics, and recommendations.
“Now this feels like it’s opening the gates where Amazon’s connecting all the moving pieces,” said Dudon, reacting to the announcement.
A live demo featured Richard Brown, founder of sneaker care brand Proof Culture, who built his own AI assistant named “Lisa” and connected it to his Amazon selling account. “Amazon is the heart of my business,” Richard told the audience, “and like a lot of you, I built systems around it over the years. Spreadsheets, flat files, custom integrations. Each one solved a problem. None of them talked to each other.”
On stage, Lisa caught a sneaker release coming that Friday from Richard’s news feed, flagged that sneaker drops mean demand is headed his way, and in the same briefing surfaced a supplier cost increase on his best seller. Richard asked, “What does the new cost do to my margin, and can my inventory cover the demand spike after Friday?” Lisa pulled his live sales pace and stock levels from Amazon, put them against his supplier’s numbers, and gave him the answer. Margin tightens. At the current pace, he’ll run short right when demand peaks. She recommended adjusting pricing on two SKUs and drafted the inbound shipment. One click, done.
“You don’t need to build what I built,” Richard told the audience. “I build because I love it, that’s my thing. The hard part was never the AI. The hard part was getting my selling data into it, and that’s the part that’s now simple with the plugin. Just connect your account and start asking questions.”
Then Jose Kunnackal John, director of Product Management announced that Amazon was gifting every Amazon seller a free 12-month Amazon Quick Plus subscription, covering the primary account holder plus two additional users designated through Seller Central. “Amazon Quick is a complete AI workspace for your selling business,” John said. “It is not a chatbot or a search bar. It is an intelligent assistant that knows your business.” The same intelligence, the same expertise, the same memory, now available outside Seller Central.
“Committing more of my effort to Amazon Quick will mean less reliance on multiple AI platforms, becoming even easier to streamline all AI together,” Dudon commented.
What happens next
Lady has spent the last five years building her own AI employees, her own dashboards, her own automations to keep a $2,000 idea running across five countries. She watched the keynote and saw Amazon building the same infrastructure she’d already stitched together on her own. “A lot of what I have already built for my business, Amazon is now building into the platform. That frees me up to focus on what’s next,” she said.
After the first day of Amazon Accelerate, Laura Lady, Founder and CEO of FryAway, said Amazon’s new and enhanced AI tools will give her back time to focus on other aspects of her business.
Dudon comes back to Accelerate every year, and every year his business doubles. He’s used to walking out of the keynote with a list of tools to try. This year he walked out with a different kind of question. “The tools are so powerful,” he said. “Now the challenge is how am I different?” He said it like someone who already had ideas.
Quirk has been to four Accelerates and watched the event change from year to year. This one felt different to her in a way that had nothing to do with the product announcements. “This year feels more like Amazon is talking with me,” she said. “And that is my favorite thing this year. It’s so nice to actually meet people at Amazon, hear from other sellers. This year there’s been some follow-up, which is going to make me a smarter person as soon as I leave this building.”