Sept 19 (Reuters) - Amazon.com ( AMZN ) announced on

Thursday a new artificial intelligence application that it says

will help its independent sellers with sales metrics, inventory

maintenance and product advertising, among other things.

The move is part of a broader Big Tech effort to employ the

technology for greater automation.

The software, dubbed Amelia, can provide instantaneous

answers to broad questions such as how to prepare for the

holidays and how a seller's business is performing, including

units sold and website traffic.

Later, the company says, the software will be able to help

resolve problems of sellers such as delayed shipments without

additional human intervention.

In a demonstration of the software for Reuters, Amazon ( AMZN )

showed how Amelia can quickly call up metrics for a seller, such

as sales data. It also made suggestions for preparing for major

sales holidays, including promotions and buying advertising on

Amazon.com ( AMZN ).

Amelia is meant to give sellers "their own personalized

expert in selling on Amazon ( AMZN )," said Dharmesh Mehta, vice

president of worldwide selling partner services at Amazon ( AMZN ). "It

needs to be a deep expert in all these kind of core parts of

running your selling business."

Amazon ( AMZN ), which relies on third-parties to supply more than

three out of every five units it sells, has had an at-times

testy relationship with sellers, particularly over fees.

By automating some of the seller customer service, Amazon ( AMZN )

may be able to more inexpensively handle complaints and other

difficulties that would otherwise require human intervention.

The Seattle retailer announced Amelia during its annual

conference in its hometown where many of its roughly 450,000

U.S. independent sellers converge for tips and tricks, and to

learn about new products and services.

Amelia follows the announcement earlier this year of Rufus,

a generative AI search engine Amazon ( AMZN ) added to its website to

help customers find more products. Amazon ( AMZN ) has since started

selling advertising within Rufus, suggesting it may let

marketers pay in exchange for the software's recommendation.

It has also rolled out a corporate chatbot and is working to

improve its Alexa voice assistant by updating it with a more

conversational AI.

Amazon ( AMZN ) boosted capital expenditure in this year's second

quarter to about $16.5 billion from $14 billion in the first

quarter, driven in large part by AI investments.

Since the release in late 2022 of ChatGPT, Silicon Valley

has seen an investing frenzy over generative AI which can create

full sentence responses to prompts or create lifelike images or

sounds.

But generative AI software can invent answers, known as

hallucinations, when it lacks sufficient training data. Mehta

said Amelia could hallucinate and such occasions would be

addressed depending on the severity of the mistake.

He said Amazon ( AMZN ) had no plans to offer ads within Amelia. The

service will not be made available in its current form to large

brands such as Unilever ( UL ), who also sell on Amazon ( AMZN ), he

said.

Amazon ( AMZN ) said Amelia will initially be available only to a

small subset of sellers and only in English before nearly all

U.S. sellers gain access over the next month.

(Reporting by Greg Bensinger; Editing by Muralikumar

Anantharaman)