AMZN
The doomsday take? Not so fast
Some investors are side-eyeing Amazon because AI shopping agents could shrink the old-school discovery-to-checkout funnel — and with it, Amazon’s ad business. Rosenblatt’s Scott Devitt basically said: pump the brakes.
He kept a Buy rating and raised his price target from $335 to $360, arguing Amazon has already lived through plenty of consumer-behavior plot twists and usually comes out looking annoyingly resilient.
Why the thesis isn’t as scary as it sounds
Devitt’s argument is pretty simple: even if an AI assistant helps shoppers skip a few clicks, Amazon still owns a ton of the actual value chain. If the customer lands in Amazon’s ecosystem, Amazon can still collect the transaction and fulfillment tolls like the world’s most efficient landlord.
He also noted that early tests of sponsored placements inside agentic flows have been encouraging, which is basically Amazon saying: if the future is a chatbot, it wants ad space in the chat.
Amazon wants to own the whole funnel anyway
Management’s bigger play is Alexa for Shopping, which is being designed to grab the whole journey from intent to checkout. The pitch is that third-party agents still can’t match Amazon’s combo of personalization, pricing accuracy, and inventory data without deeper integrations.
That means the company may not be facing a sudden cliff so much as a weird transition. And if AI shopping expands the overall e-commerce pie, Amazon could end up being the one slicing it.
Big picture: investors love a good extinction narrative, but Amazon’s business is built like a hydra. Cut one discovery layer, and it may just grow another funnel.