Amazon Ads Agent unifies ad buying across formats with AI-powered automation

Amazon's advertising division remains a standout performer within the broader company, pulling in nearly $20 billion in revenue during Q2 2026 and surpassing analyst projections. The company is doubling down on this momentum by continuing to refine its Amazon Ads platform, using its UnBoxed conference to unveil fresh capabilities designed to make the service more intuitive and effective for advertisers.

On September 29, Amazon unveiled Amazon Ads Agent, the rebranded version of its unified platform that merges its demand-side platform with its ads console. The platform consolidates sponsored ads, display, video and audio offerings in a single interface, with artificial intelligence—specifically an enhanced chat experience—guiding advertisers through each phase of campaign development.

"How do we provide more of the capabilities and access to the trillions of signals that we have for marketers who are trying to reach people where they are in their advertising journey?" asked Kelly MacLean, vice president at Amazon Ads. "How do we continue to just make it easy? How do we drive radical simplification in the way that marketers want to work with us?"

Unified and simplified campaigns

Amazon Ads Agent supports three distinct campaign types, anchored by its core sponsored product ad offering. Full-funnel campaigns, which were previewed at the previous year's UnBoxed event, are now rolling out to all advertisers in the United States. Advertisers simply supply budget, product information and creative materials, while Amazon's AI manages strategy, execution and ongoing optimization across all channels.

Amazon highlighted a case study involving Canine Naturals, a dog treat manufacturer, which deployed full-funnel campaigns to consolidate its fragmented efforts across the platform and reduce manual workload. Over a 206-day span, the full-funnel campaign generated 41% of sales from customers new to the brand. The approach also revealed the broader impact of advertising beyond immediate sales metrics and delivered superior return-on-ad-spend compared to separately managed campaigns.

"I don't have to do anything, just give it all the assets and it'll figure it out. That's music to my ears," said Brenda Quintana, digital marketing manager at Canine Naturals.

Amazon Ads Agent also extends programmatic capabilities to all advertisers through DVA+, a new ad format that merges display video and audio ads that were previously handled through separate workflows, encompassing sponsored display, sponsored TV and display video and audio programmatic campaigns. The offering leverages Amazon's Brand+ and Performance+ tools, which handle audience identification and outcome optimization respectively, and will start rolling out to all advertisers in late October through year-end.

A previously announced creative agent operates automatically within both full-funnel campaigns and DVA+ to expand creative assets using generative AI. Cuisinart, working alongside agency partner Global Overview, tested Amazon Ads' creative generation capabilities to speed up creative production while preserving brand consistency.

A test conducted in Q2 2026 centered on the company's food processor line generated an 18-point increase in detail page view rate relative to conventionally produced creative, a 14% reduction in cost per detail page view and a 10-point increase in branded search rate, according to Amazon's case study.

The pilot demonstrated that AI-driven tools can be deployed by brands and agencies while maintaining creative oversight. Amazon is observing uptake of generative AI tools among both major brands and smaller advertisers, contrary to some predictions that only smaller players would embrace AI-generated creative.

"We have great partnerships with agencies. We see this as a huge enabler for creative agencies; not all agencies have resources for all types of brands to build beautiful creative for every campaign," MacLean said. "Maybe it's a much smaller brand that they're advertising, in addition to the parent brand… and this is a way to also empower them to do that."

More conversational

Amazon introduced a conversational interface within Amazon Ads with initial capabilities aimed at simplifying campaign setup. Advertisers who used natural language to implement targeting recommendations saw more than 25% additional unique customers while reducing costs by more than 10% for cost-per-impression on average.

At UnBoxed, Amazon rolled out expanded chat capabilities covering media planning, AI targeting, campaign guidance, natural language analytics, sponsored ads guidance and insight generation. These features are launching in beta to qualifying advertisers across 20 marketplaces in 21 languages, MacLean noted.

"[The conversational experience is] surfacing more opportunities to improve targeting, bids and budgets within a click or less, and then you can measure and ask more questions across your overall connected experience," the executive said.

The rollout also includes functionality within Amazon Marketing Cloud that provides deeper insights and intelligence without requiring knowledge of SQL programming. Dentsu participated as a beta tester of the conversational experience, which is fundamentally reshaping how its teams operate, according to Jason O'Toole, executive vice president and head of commerce and retail media at the agency.

"Rather than spending hours on manual campaign setup and optimization, we can now make human-informed optimizations directly," O'Toole said. "Our strategists spend less time on execution mechanics and more time on the insights and creative thinking that drive results for our clients."