As Prime Day kicks off today, Amazon is debuting Alexa+ Agentic Ads on its Echo Show devices. The move is part of the retail giant’s broader push to help shoppers discover new products and deals through agentic and conversational experiences.
According to Amazon, Alexa+ Agentic Ads is the first ad format that takes customers from seeing an ad to completing a purchase entirely within an organic conversation without ever having to leave the ad, whether they’re ordering food or buying concert tickets. Customers will also be able to ask questions and review options all in the same conversation.
People are already engaging with Alexa in their daily lives for everything from trip planning to making dinner reservations, but Charlotte Maines, VP of devices content and ads for Amazon, wanted to find ways for advertisers to become more involved in these moments.
“We already had this whole spectrum of experiences that customers are having outside of shopping, and I wanted to make sure advertisers could participate in these high-intent moments,” Maines said.
To start, Amazon is launching Alexa+ Agentic Ads with several brand partners, including Papa Johns for food, and music artists Beck, Jill Scott, and Omar Courtz for concert tickets. The company expects to partner with more brands and services in the future.
[Image: Amazon]
Here’s how it works: Say a Prime member sees an ad on their device for Jill Scott’s show. They can say something like, “Hey, Alexa, I see this Jill Scott concert is coming up. Are there tickets available?” and Alexa will respond and present options for the day and time of the concert at the nearest venue.
Depending on how many tickets the customer wants, Alexa will then pull up seating options in available sections. Customers can request better sections and make adjustments to the original offering, and once they find the perfect tickets they can purchase them through Alexa (the tickets will be available in their Ticketmaster account shortly after).
If someone wants to order pizza on a Friday night, they can go to the Papa Johns ad and place an order directly. If they’ve previously ordered through Alexa, their past conversations can be referenced to include their favorite toppings. Those can be changed or customized if a customer wants to try something different.
“We’re integrated on the back end with third-party ordering systems and the pizza is on its way to you, so we’re tying it back to personalization and signals,” Maines said. “Over time, we will understand better what a customer and their family wants on their pizza, so Alexa can suggest their usual two large pizzas, maybe one is cheese, the other is Hawaiian, and they can go from seeing the placement to having that pizza on the way in a millisecond because it surfaced what she already knew the customer wanted.”
Maines added, “That’s how we’re thinking about continuing to evolve the experience to both be better for customers and help advertisers be more relevant based on what we understand about them as a customer.”
[Image: Amazon]
The addition of Alexa+ Agentic Ads builds on Amazon’s existing formats, including Sponsored Ads, Sponsored Products, and Sponsored Brands prompts on Alexa for Shopping as well as Conversational Ads on Alexa+. According to the company, during Prime Day week last year, brands that used Sponsored Ads saw, on average, 30% more units sold globally as a result of their advertising activity.
Amazon also offers Amazon Ads AI-powered tools to help advertisers create and launch full-funnel campaigns. Creative Agent produces professional ads in just a few hours; Ads Agent cuts campaign setup and targeting from weeks to minutes; and the Amazon MCP server connects external AI agents to Amazon Ads API via simple prompts that don’t require custom coding.
“The goal for every brand is reaching the right people wherever they are and having compelling ads that drive those business results,” Kelly MacLean, VP of Amazon Ads, told Fast Company last year ahead of the company’s annual unBoxed conference. “But with our vast offerings, we’ve heard from customers that they also need a more streamlined process.”