ADWEEK Advantage is part of a series where every month, our top editors interpret what happened in each vertical, and what it means for the future.
At Amazon’s annual UnBoxed advertising event, the retail giant outlined an overhaul of its core ad platform to integrate chat-based features and AI.
Dubbed Amazon Ads Agent, the platform aims to integrate AI into all advertiser workflows, including two campaign types—DVA+ and full-funnel campaigns—that recommend which formats advertisers should buy to hit goals, from upper-funnel streaming campaigns to lower-funnel search ads.
While advertisers can apply controls, Amazon is pitching the revamped ads platform more broadly as a way for Amazon’s AI to guide advertisers’ spend and strategies.
“Amazon Ads Agent helps you move faster and with more confidence,” Kelly MacLean, vp of Amazon Ads, said during the keynote session at UnBoxed. “When you’re spending less time on mechanics, you get to ask the better question: What else is possible for my brand?”
In the short term: advertisers flag transparency issues
Despite the rise in AI, some advertisers are wary of having agents control ad buys, specifically when it comes to execution and optimization, said Zach Ricchiuti, vp of strategy at Kepler.
“When it comes to actually making decisions, that’s where we still have people stepping in and making decisions,” he said. “That’s the nuance that you still need.”
That said, Ricchiuti said there are use cases for agents to automate planning, research, and building campaigns.
He also warned that Amazon’s tools could be another example of a black box, similar to Google’s Performance Max, where advertisers lose some audience transparency and control for performance. In the case of Amazon’s tools, the company said that its AI can recommend which formats advertisers should buy based on a campaign’s budget and goal.
“It took a lot of years for Performance Max to be a product that people trusted,” Ricchiuti said. “The job of a brand and agency is to be skeptical of what a black-box solution is—there should be a healthy dose of skepticism around, like, what media and what audiences are actually being bought.”
In the long term: advertisers are using more agentic tools
At the same time that ad buyers are skeptical of black boxes, more agencies are using agentic-based workflows and tools.
In the past year, Amazon-focused adtech firm Gigi has pivoted its business from helping brands buy streaming ads to managing agencies’ spend and operations with Amazon’s demand-side platform.
Adam Epstein, cofounder and CEO of Gigi, said that marketers are still looking for custom, bespoke agents that help agencies with individual ways of working, especially with Amazon’s trove of properties and data.
“We have the concept of a holistic view of the customer,” he said.
In other cases, agencies have their own agentic tools for managing Amazon.
Omnicom Media Group, for example, has its own tool, similar to Amazon’s, that recommends where clients should spend money within Amazon. Omnicom also owns data firm Acxiom, which can track ad impressions to sales, said Mike Feldman, global head of commerce at Omnicom Media Group.
“Every product we build is agentic-enabled with MCPs [Model Context Protocol servers],” Feldman said, referring to the open standard that lets AI agents connect to and operate software tools.
