Inside Amazon's $60B ad push as AI takes the creative director role
Amazon's new agentic AI acts like a creative director, turning data into ad concepts. Creatives keep the taste; AI boosts volume, testing speed, and relevance across Amazon.
When AI Becomes the Creative Director: What Amazon's New Agentic Tools Mean for Creatives
Advertising brings in roughly $60 billion a year for Amazon, accounting for more than 9% of its revenue. That scale explains why the company is investing in AI that acts like a creative director for ads.
At Amazon's Accelerate conference in Seattle, Jay Richman, Amazon Ads vice president of product and technology, introduced agentic AI features for Amazon's Creative Studio. These tools generate ad concepts informed by market research, consumer behavior, and Amazon's data.
Richman's stance is clear: AI won't replace great creatives-it multiplies their impact. Think of it as turning 10x talent into 100x output. The best work still comes from professionals; AI is a new canvas and paintbrush, not a shortcut past taste, judgment, or craft.
What this means for your creative process
- Start with a tight brief: brand voice, audience, desired action, constraints, and assets. AI performs at the level of your inputs.
- Treat AI like a junior creative director: ask for multiple concepts, mood boards, scripts, headlines, and visual directions before you pick a path.
- Build a feedback loop: generate variants, test, and iterate based on performance data (CTR, CVR, ROAS). Let results guide refinements.
- Create reusable prompt frameworks: brand voice, formatting rules, visual style, compliance notes. Save time and keep work consistent.
- Keep taste in the driver's seat: you still own concept, narrative, and polish. AI accelerates production; you define what's on-brand and what's good.
- Check rights and safety: verify asset usage, disclosures, and brand safety before publishing. Good ops prevent costly mistakes.
Where agentic AI is likely strongest
- High-volume ad variations for marketplaces and social platforms.
- Dynamic product imagery and scene generation for listings and storefronts.
- Audience-informed messaging that adapts by segment and context.
- Localization and transcreation at scale with human review for nuance.
- Faster production cycles without bloating headcount.
Practical workflow to try this week
- Define the brief: objective, single KPI, audience insight, brand guardrails.
- Ask AI for 10 distinct creative territories with headlines, hooks, and visual notes.
- Select 2-3 routes. Generate scripts, image prompts, and layout options for each.
- Produce a test set: short-form video, static, and product detail page imagery.
- Run a structured A/B test with clear success metrics and sample size targets.
- Ship the winner, then codify what worked into your prompt and brand system.
Skills to sharpen now
- Creative operations with AI: versioning, approvals, asset management, and QA.
- Data literacy: reading lift, sample size needs, confidence levels, and incrementality.
- Multimodal direction: storyboarding, sound, pacing, and visual grammar for AI-first production.
- Ethics and brand safety: bias checks, truth in advertising, and disclosure standards.
- Systems thinking: build libraries for prompts, brand rules, and reusable templates.
Why this matters inside Amazon's ecosystem
Agentic AI inside Creative Studio can tie creative choices to real buyer behavior on Amazon. That shortens feedback cycles and helps teams produce targeted variations without grinding through manual work.
If your products sell on Amazon, expect faster turnarounds, more context-aware creative, and higher testing velocity. The opportunity is to publish more relevant work, more often, with the same headcount.
Who's behind the push
Jay Richman leads product and technology for Amazon Ads and announced the agentic AI update on stage at Accelerate. His background spans early Palm Pilot apps, the first wave of streaming at NBC Universal, and the reinvention of podcast ads at Spotify. He's based in New York and focuses on how AI augments expert creatives rather than replacing them.
Resources
Bottom line for creatives
AI isn't the artist-it's the studio you always wanted. The teams that win will pair taste, insight, and strategy with systems that produce, test, and learn at speed.
Ship more. Learn faster. Let data inform your instincts-and keep the craft non-negotiable.
