Sensor Tower's Ian Simpson Reveals Critical Details About Rufus (Amazon's Agentic Commerce Assistant) - That Brands Can Action Today📆

Inside the (very real) shopping behavior shift with Amazon's Rufus, and why agentic shopping pushes brands back toward better product data, better storytelling, and stronger trust signals.

Feb 05, 2026

Ian Simpson, SVP of Innovation & Strategy at Sensor Tower, leads custom, consultative work that helps clients turn emerging behavioral signals into actionable intelligence, and, often, new products.

His path into commerce data is anything but linear: he started in politics and international relations (including time connected to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC), earned an MBA, built brand and retail muscle in CPG (including work tied to The Wonderful Company brands like POM Wonderful and Wonderful Pistachios), and spent time consulting at IBM.

He later joined Pathmatics (eventually acquired into Sensor Tower), where he helped clients answer a core modern question: “What’s really happening across digital, retail media, and now AI-driven shopping behaviors?”

Listen/Watch Our Interview:

In this episode, Scot digs into a question he keeps getting from readers and listeners: What’s actually going on inside Amazon’s Rufus, and what should brands do about it?

Ian brings fresh analysis from Sensor Tower’s panel-based methodology (privacy-compliant, double opt-in), walking through Holiday ’25 shopping sessions to show where Rufus shows up in the funnel, how usage spikes during peak moments, and why it appears to correlate with dramatically higher conversion. Along the way, they zoom out to the bigger shift: as more people learn to “talk to AI” (thanks to ChatGPT-style habits), conversational shopping becomes increasingly normal, and increasingly hard to “optimize” using old keyword-era tactics.

Highlights

“The consumer is trained.” A year of daily conversational AI use has taught people how to prompt, so when they see Amazon Rufus, they already know how to use it.
Rufus sessions show a major conversion lift. In Ian’s read of the report: ~3.5× lift vs. non-Rufus sessions, with Rufus-touch sessions far more likely to end in purchase.
Rufus had outsized influence during Holiday ’25. A large share of purchases included Rufus interaction, even if not every session did.
Their team mapped ten distinct Rufus-assisted shopping paths, including the standout “Research Conversationalist” profile.
Correlation vs causation is real. Ian flags measurement caveats: not every “non-Rufus session” is a shopping mission; intent bias exists; so the takeaway is directional, but meaningful.
Brands should shift from “keyword jail” to “product truth.” Better attributes, clearer specs, stronger review signals, and real storytelling matter more in conversational shopping.
AEO anxiety + the brand-level rebound. Ian argues the future isn’t just “optimize for prompts”, it may reward brands with stronger reputation and social proof signals (think forums and communities).
AI can talk consumers out of premium. They’ve seen examples where AI steers price-sensitive users away from expensive brands, an early warning system for brand teams.
Retail media won’t vanish, but it will mutate. In a lower-click world, retailers will experiment heavily to preserve value, without turning the experience into ad soup.

If you’ve been treating Rufus like a curiosity, this data makes it hard to ignore: conversational commerce isn’t “coming”, it’s already shaping how high-intent shoppers decide.

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple, etc.