Amazon Business unveiled new procurement technology capabilities Oct. 27 during its annual Reshape conference in Nashville, further expanding the B2B marketplace’s services beyond product purchasing and fulfillment.

The announcements center on Value Intelligence, a new procurement analytics offering, and expanded capabilities for Amazon Business Assistant, its AI-powered purchasing tool.

Value Intelligence combines three purchasing performance measures — cost savings, operational efficiency and purchasing policy compliance — into a single reporting experience.

Available to eligible customers through Amazon Business Analytics, the tool calculates savings using customers’ actual line-item purchase data against reference prices. It also quantifies operational efficiencies based on account activity and tracks purchasing compliance.

Amazon said the calculations incorporate independent third-party research, with methodologies and inputs that customers can review and adjust.

“Procurement has always been about more than price, but price is what gets reported because it’s the easiest thing to measure,” Amazon Business Worldwide Vice President Shelley Salomon said in the company’s announcement.

Meanwhile, Amazon Business expanded its AI Assistant’s ability to analyze account-specific purchasing information and carry out routine procurement tasks.

The enhanced assistant enables customers to use conversational queries to:

• Track orders, delivery dates and pending approvals
• Identify purchasing approval bottlenecks and notification status
• Surface savings opportunities and assist with payment allocation
• Analyze spending patterns using natural-language questions

The assistant draws on more than 60 reporting fields and up to two years of purchasing history, including orders, shipments, payments, refunds and seller information.

Amazon said the expanded capabilities are available to all U.S. Amazon Business customers, with existing purchasing permissions and approval requirements remaining in place.

Other 2026 Platform Enhancements

The announcements follow several other Amazon Business improvements made public this year:

• February: Launched AI-powered Savings Insights to analyze purchasing history and identify opportunities for quantity discounts, recurring-order savings and other cost reductions.
• June: Overhauled its Spend Visibility dashboards and enhanced Spend Anomaly Monitoring with broader administrator access, weekly digest emails and AI Assistant integration.
• August: Introduced Shared Cart, enabling employees to collaborate on purchases while maintaining pricing visibility, approval controls and opportunities for consolidated-order savings.
• September: Expanded purchasing reconciliation reports to include 75 data columns, including 41 new fields covering shipment details, pricing and charges.

The investments follow Amazon Business surpassing $60 billion in annualized gross sales during 2Q26, up from approximately $35 billion at the end of 2022. The platform serves more than 11 million organizations worldwide and expanded its product selection by nearly 30% during the first half of 2026.

MDM Analysis

Amazon Business is increasingly competing for more than distributors’ product sales. By embedding purchasing controls, spending analytics and AI assistance into its platform, Amazon is strengthening its position within customers’ procurement workflows — potentially making it more lucrative for customers to keep more of their purchasing within Amazon Business and harder for them to shift it elsewhere.

The competitive threat extends beyond price and convenience to the administrative efficiency and measurable value Amazon can demonstrate.

For distributors, the takeaway is twofold: Continue improving digital purchasing experiences, including order visibility, system integrations and account-level analytics, while better quantifying the value of differentiated services.

Technical expertise, emergency availability, inventory management and onsite support remain advantages that Amazon cannot easily replicate across specialized markets. But distributors increasingly need to demonstrate those advantages through measurable customer outcomes rather than assume longstanding relationships will preserve their share of business.