Agentic commerce and agentic advertising were on full display at Amazon Ads unBoxed 2026. Amazon demonstrated how predictive, generative, and agentic AI can take on the work of helping consumers decide what to buy and helping advertisers turn business objectives into media outcomes. Over the course of the event, we heard directly from Amazon’s leaders and customers, met one on one with product SMEs, and spoke with partners working across Amazon Ads’ ecosystem.
Here are our four takeaways:
- Amazon wants advertisers to buy outcomes, not ad products. Amazon Ads Agent, DVA+, and its Full-Funnel Campaigns offering reduce the need for advertisers to translate business goals into disparate campaigns, channels, audiences, and creative decisions. For example, Full-Funnel Campaigns uses predictive AI to determine the channel mix and target audiences, creative variables, and optimization levers likely to hit a marketer-specified objective. But greater automation risks advertisers giving Amazon more control while getting less visibility into the logic underlying media outcomes. Advertisers should dictate where Amazon’s optimization authority begins and ends, requiring transparency into why its systems moved dollars, favored certain inventory, or pursued one outcome over another, especially as Amazon owns the media, marketplace, and, increasingly, the decisioning layer.
- Brands can have a say in AI-powered shopping conversations. Branded Conversations lets brands provide information about their products, differentiators, use cases, and complementary products that Alexa for Shopping (formerly known as Rufus) can surface as consumers research and compare options. But Amazon will need to avoid turning a helpful shopping experience into another sponsored results page. Treat AI shopping as a new consideration surface. Start by asking what Amazon already knows about your products, then engineer the information you contribute around specific consumer decisions, such as why a shopper should pay more for your product. Run Branded Conversations as an incrementality experiment by measuring whether exposure changes consideration, branded search, add-to-cart rates, and conversions across shoppers.
- Performance measurement now goes beyond immediate sales. Amazon’s long-term sales metric gives advertisers a longer view of campaign impact through Ads Agent. This methodology attempts to capture the impact of upper-funnel advertising on future revenue and does so by assigning value to intermediate actions (e.g., product detail page visits, video views) based on how likely those actions are to result in a sale beyond the typical attribution window. Extending the clock like this captures more of the value of advertising, but without controlling for outside factors and non-Amazon advertising activity, it is not causal measurement. Advertisers should treat Amazon’s long-term sales metric as one signal in a broader measurement system, not the ultimate scoreboard for business impact. Reconcile Amazon-reported performance against independent incrementality testing, marketing mix models, customer lifetime value, new customer acquisition, and your own first-party sales data.
- Sponsored Services is the proving ground for Amazon’s non-endemic ambitions. This solution connects shoppers directly with local service providers through Amazon’s partnership with Yelp. For example, a consumer purchasing a TV can also schedule installation. For service providers, the near-term opportunity is to intercept consumers who are already signaling high-value intent inside Amazon and turn that demand into leads and bookings. Expect Amazon to extend this model to categories like financial services, insurance, travel, home services, and healthcare by using its rich understanding of consumer intent to connect discovery, advertising, and downstream commercial activity.
Amazon Ads’ latest announcements promise to limit friction across media planning, buying, and measurement. They also give Amazon more control over which consumers advertisers reach, which messages they see, where budgets flow, and which metrics define success. As an advertiser, embrace automation, but stay vigilant. Set hard guardrails around budget allocation and optimization, maintain independent measurement wherever possible, and pressure-test Amazon’s recommendations against incrementality and business outcomes.
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