Amazon Ads Agent Hands Campaign Planning to AI

Amazon Ads has renamed its unified advertising platform Amazon Ads Agent and rebuilt it around agentic AI, adding a hands-off campaign type for US advertisers and a new buying tool called DVA+. For marketers, the significance is less the branding than the direction: Amazon is steadily moving campaign planning, channel selection and optimisation from the advertiser to its own models, while offering manual controls to those who want to keep them.

The announcement came at the company's unBoxed event on 29 September 2026. Most of the performance claims come from Amazon itself, and several details, including pricing and international availability, were not disclosed.

What Amazon announced

According to Relevant Audience's account of the announcement, which cites Amazon's statement and Digiday's coverage, the platform that resulted from last year's plan to merge Amazon's demand-side platform and its advertising console is now called Amazon Ads Agent. Amazon describes it as powered by agentic AI and says the system draws on "trillions of shopping, browsing, and streaming signals." Advertisers can build campaigns manually, let the AI optimise them, or mix both approaches.

The platform now organises its offerings into three campaign types: sponsored ads, Full-Funnel Campaigns and DVA+. A conversational assistant works across them. IT Brief UK describes the move as part of a year-long effort by Amazon to consolidate its advertising technology stack.

Full-Funnel Campaigns

Full-Funnel Campaigns is the most automated option. Per Relevant Audience, advertisers supply a budget, products and creative, and Amazon's AI handles planning, execution and ongoing optimisation across sponsored ads, display, video and streaming TV. It is available now to all advertisers in the United States. Advertisers can generate video and display images from existing product pages and approve them before launch. Reporting covers impressions, clicks and sales, along with new-to-brand and long-term sales metrics.

Amit Bhattacharyya, Amazon Ads vice president for agentic intelligence and models, said the product "tunes itself toward long-term growth," according to the same account. Amazon's pitch is that signals flowing across formats allow upper-funnel spending to improve lower-funnel results.

The trade-off is transparency. Citing Digiday, Relevant Audience reports that advertisers approve creative but cannot choose individual channels or audiences, and that Amazon offers format-level visibility only. Bhattacharyya told Digiday that Amazon is working on more audience transparency and on explanations for its targeting and budget recommendations. That means the system's decisions are, for now, difficult for an advertiser to audit.

DVA+

DVA+, short for Display, Video, and Audio, combines Sponsored Display, Sponsored TV and programmatic campaigns into one buying experience across streaming TV, online video, display and audio, on Amazon properties and the wider internet. Setup starts with a business goal such as sales, traffic or awareness, and Amazon says it can take minutes. Both outlets say it builds on two existing optimisation products: Brand+, which targets audiences likely to take meaningful action such as visiting a Brand Store or buying, and Performance+, which targets in-market shoppers and optimises toward the chosen outcome.

Advanced settings retain manual control over targeting, deals, supply sources, frequency caps and bidding, which matters for experienced programmatic buyers who will not hand over those levers. Relevant Audience says DVA+ begins rolling out from late October 2026, while IT Brief UK says only that DVA+ and wider features will roll out over the coming months. Neither states a general availability date.

The conversational layer

Alongside the campaign types, Amazon is adding natural-language features: media planning, AI targeting from plain-language audience descriptions, natural-language analytics, and one-click AI guidance for Sponsored Products. IT Brief UK lists uses such as audience sizing, reach forecasts, campaign analysis and optimisation recommendations, and says the aim is to reduce manual report building and administration. Relevant Audience says Amazon gave no dates for these beyond "the coming months," with the Sponsored Products guidance arriving over that period.

Jason O'Toole, executive vice president and head of commerce and retail media at dentsu, is quoted by IT Brief UK saying the conversational experience "is fundamentally changing how our teams work," and that his strategists spend less time on execution and more on insights and creative thinking. That is an agency executive's endorsement of a product his firm uses, and should be read in that light.

Claims and gaps

Amazon cites earlier US usage in support of the conversational tools. According to both outlets, advertisers who applied targeting recommendations through natural language gained more than 25% additional unique customers and saw cost per impression fall by more than 10% on average. Relevant Audience points out that Amazon did not disclose the sample size, time period, markets or comparison baseline, so the figures cannot be independently verified.

Relevant Audience also lists items Amazon has not addressed:

• Whether or when Full-Funnel Campaigns will reach markets outside the United States.
• The list of countries for DVA+.
• Pricing or fees for Full-Funnel Campaigns or DVA+.
• How existing Sponsored Display and Sponsored TV campaigns will be handled once DVA+ arrives.

The last point is the most practical for current advertisers. If DVA+ replaces the separate products it combines, teams will need to migrate budgets, audiences and reporting, and it is unclear what happens to historical campaign structures.

Why it matters for marketers

The announcement fits a wider pattern in advertising platforms: the interface shifts from configuring audiences and placements to stating objectives and supplying assets. For small advertisers, that lowers the effort of running campaigns across several formats. For larger ones, it raises questions about measurement and control, because a system that chooses its own channels also grades its own results.

There is also a competitive angle. Because Amazon sells the products being advertised, it holds purchase data that few other ad platforms can match. The company's statement about drawing on shopping, browsing and streaming signals is a claim about that advantage, though the outlets reviewed do not show how those signals are weighted or how much each contributes to results.

Agencies may feel the change most. If planning and optimisation are automated and the conversational assistant answers analytics questions in plain language, the work shifts toward creative quality, brand strategy and cross-platform measurement. That is consistent with O'Toole's remarks, although a single quote does not establish an industry trend.

What to watch next

Three developments will show whether the shift is substantive. First, whether Amazon publishes the audience and channel transparency that Bhattacharyya said it is working on, since opaque automation is the main sticking point for experienced buyers. Second, the DVA+ rollout and whether advanced controls remain intact once it is widely available. Third, independent results: advertiser case studies and third-party measurement will say more than Amazon's averages.

Until then, the practical advice for marketers is modest. Full-Funnel Campaigns is available to US advertisers now and can be tested against existing campaigns using the metrics Amazon reports, but with limited visibility into how the budget is allocated, any comparison will need clear baselines set in advance. DVA+ is still arriving, and pricing remains unknown.