Amazon Ads Agent Puts AI in Charge of Campaign Buying

Amazon used its annual UnBoxed advertising event to announce an overhaul of its core ad platform around AI, with a new product called Amazon Ads Agent that recommends which ad formats advertisers should buy to hit their goals.

The agent integrates AI into all advertiser workflows, according to the company, including two new campaign types — DVA+ and full-funnel campaigns — that span everything from upper-funnel streaming placements to lower-funnel search ads. Advertisers can apply controls, but Amazon is explicitly pitching the platform as a way for its AI to guide advertisers' spend and strategies, not just to automate tasks.

"Amazon Ads Agent helps you move faster and with more confidence," Kelly MacLean, vp of Amazon Ads, said during the UnBoxed keynote. "When you're spending less time on mechanics, you get to ask the better question: What else is possible for my brand?"

What does the change mean for advertisers?

For practitioners, the implications are direct. Amazon's AI can recommend which formats an advertiser should buy based on a campaign's budget and goal. That shifts more decision-making from media teams to the platform — trading hands-on control for speed, while raising questions about where budgets actually land.

That trade-off is exactly what worries some buyers. Zach Ricchiuti, vp of strategy at Kepler, said advertisers remain wary of agents controlling ad buys at the execution and optimization stage.

"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."

Ricchiuti still sees clear use cases for agents in planning, research and campaign building. But he warned that Amazon's tools could become another black box, comparable to Google's Performance Max, where advertisers trade audience transparency and control for performance.

"It took a lot of years for Performance Max to be a product that people trusted," he 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."

Are agencies actually adopting agentic tools?

Officially, Amazon frames Ads Agent as a speed-and-confidence play. On the ground, adoption of agentic workflows is already moving — just not always through Amazon's own tools.

In the past year, Amazon-focused adtech firm Gigi pivoted its business from helping brands buy streaming ads to managing agencies' spend and operations on Amazon's demand-side platform. Adam Epstein, cofounder and CEO of Gigi, said marketers still want custom, bespoke agents that fit individual ways of working, especially given Amazon's trove of properties and data.

"We have the concept of a holistic view of the customer," Epstein said.

Omnicom Media Group offers a competing example. The agency has built its own tool, similar to Amazon's, that recommends where clients should spend within Amazon. It also owns data firm Acxiom, which can track ad impressions through to sales.

"Every product we build is agentic-enabled with MCPs [Model Context Protocols]," said Mike Feldman, global head of commerce at Omnicom Media Group.

The split is telling: skepticism about platform-controlled black boxes coexists with rapid investment in agentic tooling of agencies' own. Amazon's bet is that convenience wins; buyers' track record with Performance Max suggests trust will take years, not a keynote, to build.