Amazon is ramping up its investment in AI-powered shopping experiences, launching Lens Live on Tuesday — a new AI-enhanced upgrade to its existing Amazon Lens visual search feature. This new tool enables consumers to discover products through visual search, similar to competing tools like Google Lens and Pinterest Lens. Amazon also noted that the feature will integrate with its AI shopping assistant, Rufus, to deliver product insights. Lens Live will not replace Amazon’s current visual search tool, Amazon Lens, which allows users to take photos, upload images, or scan barcodes to find products. Instead, it adds real-time capabilities to Amazon Lens, letting users point their phone at an object in the real world and view matching products in a scrollable carousel at the bottom of the screen. This addition represents one of many ways Amazon is leveraging AI to enhance the online shopping experience. Over the past year, the company has introduced several AI-powered features, including the Rufus assistant, AI-driven shopping guides, enhanced product reviews, AI tools for finding the right clothing fit, audio product summaries, personalized shopping tips, and tools for sellers. Lens Live also builds upon a behavior customers already engage in — comparison shopping at physical stores to check if Amazon offers better deals on the same or similar products. While using the new Lens Live feature, customers can tap any item within the camera view to activate the function and focus on that specific product. If they find a match they like, they can add it to their cart by tapping the (+) icon or save it to their wishlist by clicking the heart icon. The feature is powered by Amazon SageMaker, a service that enables large-scale machine learning model deployment. It operates on AWS-managed Amazon OpenSearch. Additionally, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, plays a role in the new experience by providing AI-generated product summaries and suggested follow-up questions. According to Amazon, this helps shoppers quickly research items and access product insights before making a purchase decision. Lens Live is initially launching on the Amazon shopping app for iOS users, rolling out to tens of millions of U.S. shoppers before expanding further across the country. The company has not yet announced plans for a global rollout.