Amazon starts selling its AI shopping technology to other retailers

Amazon has been using homegrown artificial intelligence technology to help users compare products and buy or reorder items on their behalf. Now the company is licensing that technology to other retailers, as it vies to be the backbone of AI shopping across the web.

In a blog post Wednesday, Amazon said it’s taking the “architecture, starter code and learnings” from Alexa for Shopping and packaging it together for the rest of the retail industry. The new service allows retailers to launch their own AI shopping tools tailored to their storefront, catalog and branding “in as little as 60 days,” Amazon said.

For Amazon, the move marks another effort to take technology built internally and sell it to other companies, including competitors, as a service. It’s the approach Amazon took roughly two decades ago with Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing unit, and…