Amazon introduces Nova Act, an AI agent for online shopping and web tasks

Amazon has announced a new AI agent called Nova Act that can perform tasks in the browser — including online shopping, searching for information on the web, and interacting with elements on the screen. The AI agent is currently only available to developers in a "research preview," but the company has already begun integrating it into its updated Alexa Plus voice assistant.

According to Amazon, Nova Act can not only fulfill requests, but also act independently — for example, finding products, purchasing them, answering questions about the content of the page and following complex instructions such as "do not agree to additional insurance" during checkout. The agent is also able to work on a schedule, completing tasks at a given time.

Nova Act is the first development of the Amazon AGI Labs artificial general intelligence laboratory, which aims to create agents capable of performing complex multi-step tasks - from organizing weddings to managing IT infrastructure of companies. Amid competition from OpenAI, Google and others, Amazon is betting not on the scale of models, but on efficiency and accessibility.

Nova Act joins the Nova lineup, which was introduced in December 2024. It includes three word processing models, as well as image and video generators. The company says that these models are 75% cheaper than counterparts from other vendors.

To make Nova more accessible, Amazon has launched a new web portal that allows developers and users in the US to interact with Nova models directly in the browser. Previously, the models were only available through Amazon Bedrock, an artificial intelligence platform in the Amazon Web Services ecosystem that also offers models from DeepSeek, Anthropic, Meta, and others.

"Developers can quickly test their ideas with Nova models, and then implement them at scale in Amazon Bedrock," said Rohit Prasad, senior vice president of Amazon AGI.

With Nova Act, Amazon is demonstrating its intention to take AI assistants beyond the boundaries of traditional chatbots and turn them into agents capable of operating autonomously on the Internet — another step towards creating artificial general intelligence.