Amazon Ads has announced new AI features to simplify the purchase and management of campaigns across different formats — Sponsored Products, display, video, streaming — reducing the manual work needed to orchestrate them together. The news comes from Kelly MacLean, an Amazon Ads executive, who illustrated the updates on Marketing Dive .
For those managing budgets on Amazon, the concrete point is this: until now, each format required separate configurations, separate optimizations, separate readings. AI promises to unify part of that work. It's not yet clear how much is automated and how much remains in the marketer's hands, because the technical details released are still limited.
If your company spends on Amazon Ads and works with multiple formats simultaneously, it's worth understanding what's already active and what's coming — before you continue allocating budget as if nothing has changed.
The problem Amazon wants to solve — and why it's real
Anyone who has managed campaigns on Amazon Ads knows that the catalog of formats has grown a lot: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, video, audio, streaming TV with Amazon DSP. Each channel has its own buying logic, its own metrics, its own optimization rhythms.
The practical result is that a marketing manager or an agency ends up working on different dashboards, with data that doesn't talk to each other, and has to reconcile everything manually. The time spent on this reconciliation is time taken away from strategic decisions — where to move budget, which format is really performing, where there's room for improvement.
Amazon wants to cut this friction. The ads presented by Kelly MacLean, VP Amazon Ads, aim to use AI to coordinate multi-format buying from a single point, with fewer manual steps. Full technical details are reported on Marketing Dive .
What does “multi-format AI” mean in practice
The core idea is that an AI system can read performance across all active formats and suggest — or directly execute — budget and targeting adjustments in a coordinated way, instead of leaving each format in a separate silo.
In concrete terms, this can translate to:
- Automatic budget allocation across formats based on real-time performance
- Consistent targeting across display and video without having to replicate settings manually
- Unified reporting showing each format's contribution to the purchase journey
Warning: the word “simplify” does not mean “eliminate supervision.” AI optimizes within the parameters that the marketer sets. If those parameters are wrong — unclear goals, misconfigured attribution — automation amplifies them, it doesn’t correct them. It’s the same mechanism described when talking about Google Ads Customer Lifecycle Goals: when to use them and when not to .
Who really needs it and who can wait
These updates make sense for those who:
- Has budget distributed across at least two or three Amazon formats simultaneously
- Manage campaigns with sufficient volume to provide signal to the algorithm (a few dozen conversions per week is the minimum for the AI to have data to work with)
- Already has a tidy campaign structure — AI doesn't fix mess, it speeds it up
Those who only work with Sponsored Products on a small catalog, or have monthly budgets under a few hundred euros, won't see significant differences in the short term. Amazon Ads' advanced AI features have historically been available first for higher-volume accounts.
The broader reflection on the automated media buying coming in 2026 : Amazon isn't the only platform moving in this direction, and those who don't build in-house expertise on AI applied to media risk losing control just as systems become more powerful.
Three things to do in the coming days
Before waiting for the feature to be available in your account, there are preparatory moves that make sense now.
- Check the structure of active campaigns. Each format must have distinct measurable goals. If Sponsored Display and video share the same generic goal of “awareness,” the AI won’t know how to balance them.
- Check attribution. Amazon uses different attribution windows for different formats. Before activating any automatic optimization, make sure you're looking at the same metrics over the same time period — otherwise, you're comparing apples and oranges.
- Map the formats you use and those you don't. If you’ve never activated Amazon DSP or video campaigns, ask yourself if it’s a strategic choice or a habit. Multi-format AI works best when it has more levers to pull.
For a broader picture of how AI is changing cost management in campaigns, it's worth reading about AI in marketing: the hidden costs that erode efficiency — a theme that also applies directly to Amazon Ads.
The typical mistake of those who adopt these features too quickly
The temptation is to delegate everything to the AI as soon as it’s available and stop looking at detailed data. It’s a mistake that costs you at the end of the month.
Amazon's multi-format automation — like any system of AI-powered paid media — it optimizes for the goal you give it. If the goal is short-term ROAS (return on ad spend), AI will cut formats that build demand over time, like video and display, to focus on what converts immediately. The result: good numbers today, an empty pipeline tomorrow.
Human oversight remains necessary for decisions which goals to give to the system, not to do the work the system does better than us. Separating these two roles is the skill that makes the difference — and that no platform can automate for you.
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