{"slug": "adweek-commerce-advantage-amazons-ai-driven-future-leaves-some-buyers-weary-of", "title": "ADWEEK Commerce Advantage: Amazon’s AI-Driven Future Leaves Some Buyers Weary of Losing Control", "summary": "Amazon unveiled Amazon Ads Agent at its annual UnBoxed advertising event, an overhaul of its core ad platform that integrates chat-based features and AI into all advertiser workflows, including two campaign types, DVA+ and full-funnel campaigns, that recommend which formats advertisers should buy. Kelly MacLean, vp of Amazon Ads, said \"Amazon Ads Agent helps you move faster and with more confidence,\" while Kepler vp of strategy Zach Ricchiuti warned the tools could become another black box like Google's Performance Max, where advertisers lose audience transparency and control. Omnicom Media Group's Mike Feldman said every product the agency builds is agentic-enabled with MCP servers, as agencies increasingly adopt agentic workflows for Amazon spend.", "body_md": "*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.*\n\nAt Amazon’s annual UnBoxed advertising event, the retail giant outlined an overhaul of its core ad platform to integrate chat-based features and AI.\n\nDubbed 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.\n\nWhile 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.\n\n“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?”\n\n#### **In the short term: advertisers flag transparency issues**\n\nDespite 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.\n\n“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.”\n\nThat said, Ricchiuti said there are use cases for agents to automate planning, research, and building campaigns.\n\nHe also warned that Amazon’s tools could be [another example of a black box](https://www.adweek.com/media/2026-predictions-search-takes-a-backseat-as-brands-battle-inside-ais-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.\n\n“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.”\n\n#### **In the long term: advertisers are using more agentic tools**\n\nAt the same time that ad buyers are skeptical of black boxes, more agencies are using agentic-based workflows and tools.\n\nIn the past year, Amazon-focused adtech firm Gigi has pivoted its business from [helping brands buy streaming ads](https://www.adweek.com/commerce/amazon-streaming-ads-drive-sales-walmart-target/) to managing agencies’ spend and operations with Amazon’s demand-side platform.\n\nAdam 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.\n\n“We have the concept of a holistic view of the customer,” he said.\n\nIn other cases, agencies have their own agentic tools for managing Amazon.\n\nOmnicom 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.\n\n“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.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adweek-commerce-advantage-amazons-ai-driven-future-leaves-some-buyers-weary-of", "canonical_source": "https://www.adweek.com/commerce/adweek-commerce-advantage-amazon-plots-an-ai-driven-future-but-some-ad-buyers-worry-about-giving-up-too-much-control/", "published_at": "2026-10-07 09:33:14+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-07 13:47:45.402868+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "agent-protocols", "ai-products", "generative-ai"], "entities": ["Amazon", "Amazon Ads Agent", "UnBoxed", "Kelly MacLean", "Kepler", "Zach Ricchiuti", "Gigi", "Omnicom Media Group"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adweek-commerce-advantage-amazons-ai-driven-future-leaves-some-buyers-weary-of", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adweek-commerce-advantage-amazons-ai-driven-future-leaves-some-buyers-weary-of.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adweek-commerce-advantage-amazons-ai-driven-future-leaves-some-buyers-weary-of.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adweek-commerce-advantage-amazons-ai-driven-future-leaves-some-buyers-weary-of.jsonld"}}