Amazon pushes AI-run ad campaigns at unBoxed as it folds formats into one tool

Amazon used its flagship advertising conference this week to push further into what the industry has started calling "agentic commerce," unveiling AI tools that let brands manage entire ad campaigns through plain-language conversation rather than manually building them channel by channel.

At the opening keynote of unBoxed 2026, its annual advertiser conference held this year at San Francisco's Moscone Center, Amazon Ads renamed its unified buying platform Amazon Ads Agent and introduced Full-Funnel Campaigns, a tool that combines sponsored product ads, display, video and streaming-television placements into a single AI-managed campaign rather than requiring advertisers to build each separately. The company also introduced DVA+, which folds several existing programmatic buying tools into the Ads Agent interface and is currently in closed beta in the United States, along with new features letting shoppers leave product reviews with a single tap and tools connecting advertisers with customers actively searching for services.

"What if we made it really simple, and yet very powerful for advertising?" Amit Bhattacharyya, Amazon Ads' vice president of full-funnel products, AI and modeling, said in describing the rationale behind Full-Funnel Campaigns, according to a report from the advertising trade publication Digiday. Kelly MacLean, a vice president overseeing the DVA+ rollout, described the broader approach as "human-led AI supported," framing the new tools as extending programmatic advertising capabilities to smaller advertisers who previously lacked the resources to manage complex, multi-channel campaigns.

Collapsing the walls between ad formats

The announcements reflect a broader shift Amazon has been pursuing across its advertising business: dismantling the separate buying systems that historically forced marketers to plan sponsored search ads, display banners and streaming-video spots as distinct campaigns with different budgets, targeting rules and reporting dashboards. By folding those into one AI-driven system, Amazon is betting it can capture a larger share of advertiser budgets that might otherwise go to competitors offering similarly unified, AI-assisted buying, including Google and The Trade Desk.

Amazon's advertising business has grown into one of its most profitable divisions in recent years, built largely on its access to shopping data that lets brands target ads based on what customers have actually purchased rather than inferred interests. The unBoxed announcements extend that advantage further into AI-managed execution, with the company positioning its shopping and streaming data as the foundation that makes fully automated, cross-channel campaigns more reliable than tools built by advertising-only competitors without a retail business attached.

The conference continues through Wednesday with additional sessions on measurement and small-business advertising tools, following a first day that also touched on Amazon's ongoing efforts to expand advertising within Prime Video and its Fire TV hardware. The push toward AI-managed campaigns comes as Amazon's advertising practices face separate scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission over its ad-auction procedures, a dispute the company has said it intends to contest, though that inquiry was not addressed during Tuesday's keynote.

For advertisers attending the conference, the reception to the new tools was one of cautious interest mixed with the familiar question that accompanies any pitch for ceding more campaign control to automated systems: how much visibility they will retain into exactly which audiences their ads are reaching once artificial intelligence, rather than a human media buyer, is making the moment-to-moment decisions.