Bangkok, Thailand – BJC Big C has launched an AI-powered shopping assistant on its mobile application, enabling customers in Thailand to search for products and receive recommendations using natural-language conversations rather than traditional keyword searches.
The new Shopping Assistant AI Chat was developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is available to Big C’s reported 20 million customers. The initiative forms part of the retailer’s wider digital transformation efforts aimed at improving customer experience through artificial intelligence and cloud-based technologies.
According to the companies, the assistant is built on Amazon Bedrock and uses multiple AI agents that work simultaneously to process customer requests. Different agents handle tasks such as searching the retailer’s product catalogue, matching recipe requirements, and calculating ingredient quantities, before combining the results into a single response. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore manages the coordination of these agents, while Amazon Bedrock Guardrails is used to screen responses before they are delivered to customers.
One intended use case is meal planning. Customers can enter requests such as preparing a specific dish for a certain number of people, and the assistant can generate a shopping basket containing relevant ingredients with quantities adjusted to the requested serving size.
Big C, which operates around 1,750 stores across Thailand, said the assistant is designed to help customers find products more efficiently across categories including groceries, fresh food and household goods. The tool can also provide order status updates by retrieving information on recent purchases and delivery progress.
According to pilot data shared by the companies, customers using conversational search discovered more products in categories such as fresh food and daily essentials per query, contributing to an estimated basket size increase of between 5% and 10%.
Beyond the customer-facing application, Big C’s engineering and product teams are also using AWS’s Kiro development tool. The companies said AI-assisted development workflows have reduced certain development tasks from weeks to days, helping teams expand product categories, improve recommendation capabilities and support multilingual features.
“Customers do not think in keywords or product categories. They think about meals, occasions, and what they need to get done,” said Surachai Hirannitichai, Group Chief Digital Technology of BJC Big C. “With AWS, we are making shopping faster and more intuitive by helping customers discover multiple relevant products naturally through conversation while unlocking broader opportunities to scale AI innovation across multiple business functions”
“Amazon has spent nearly 30 years helping customers find what they need across hundreds of millions of products. What that taught us is simple: the future of retail isn’t a catalogue, it’s a conversation,” said Vatsun Thirapatarapong, Country Manager at AWS Thailand. “With Big C’s conversational Shopping Assistant, customers are discovering more products per query, adding complementary items they’d never have found through keyword search, and completing transactions at higher basket values. That’s the commercial case for conversational AI in retail, and Big C is making it in one of Southeast Asia’s most competitive retail landscapes.”
