BJC’s Big C launches Shopping Assistant AI Chat on AWS, bringing conversational shopping to customers across Thailand

BANGKOK, Thailand - 28 May 2026 - Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that Big C, one of Thailand's largest retail chains, has launched a new AI-powered shopping assistant built on AWS. Available on Big C's mobile app, the assistant lets 20 million customers interact in Thai natural language rather than keywords, filters, or category menus, to find relevant products faster and discover items they would otherwise miss.

The collaboration reflects BJC Big C's broader digital transformation strategy to enhance customer experience through AI-driven retail innovation, while leveraging AWS's scalable cloud and generative AI capabilities to accelerate future retail services across Thailand.

Southeast Asia's e-commerce market hit US$157.6 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) in 2025, up 22.8% year-on-year, according to Momentum Works, and every percentage point of that growth intensifies competition for completed baskets. For a retailer with 1,750 stores across Thailand, managing tens of thousands of SKUs across grocery, fresh food and household categories, every query that returns the wrong result is a missed sale.

From single searches to full meal planning
Big C's Shopping Assistant AI Chat is built on Amazon Bedrock and uses multiple specialized AI agents working in parallel: one searches Big C's product catalogue, another matches recipe requirements, while yet another scales quantities, so a single customer query returns a completed curated answer in seconds. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore provides the secure infrastructure that runs these agents, routes requests between them, and assembles their outputs into one unified answer, while Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides the security layer that screens every response for accuracy before it reaches the customer.

For example, a customer planning dinner can key in the following prompt: 'I want to make tom yum soup for four people tonight.' for the assistant to return a curated basket of prawns, lemongrass, galangal, lime leaves, and chilli paste, with quantities automatically scaled for four servings. Multiple searches across several categories are now available in a single chat exchange.

Shorter paths to purchase
Pilot data shows how its customers are now able to discover more products from fresh food and daily essentials per conversational query, contributing to an estimated 5-10% basket size uplift. A shopper can type "where's my order?" and the assistant pulls up their recent purchases, showing whether each has been confirmed, dispatched, or is out for delivery. The primary use case is meal planning and high-frequency grocery shopping, where customers know what they want to cook but not necessarily every product they need to buy.

Developer cycles shrink alongside search queries
Behind the consumer-facing Shopping Assistant AI Chat interface, Big C's engineering and product teams use AWS's Kiro development tool to upgrade the virtual storefront faster. In a pilot, Kiro's AI-assisted development workflows have cut tasks that previously took weeks of manual coding to days, allowing the team to add product categories, sharpen recommendation logic and build multilingual capability.

"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."

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