Amazon will now let advertisers shape what its AI assistant tells shoppers. At its annual UnBoxed advertising event in San Francisco, the company unveiled Branded Conversations, an ad format that appears when consumers tap on prompts surfaced within Alexa for Shopping.

The launch gives brands direct influence over the AI-driven shopping experience. When a shopper clicks on one of these prompts, the brand — not Amazon's algorithms alone — can steer the conversation that follows. It is a marked shift from how Alexa for Shopping worked before.

Until now, the assistant pulled information for its responses from an advertiser's product catalog and Amazon store page. Amazon stitched that material together automatically. Brands had no say in how the answer was framed once a shopper engaged.

Branded Conversations changes that bargain. Advertisers gain an active hand in the new, AI-driven experience that Amazon built earlier this year.

The groundwork was laid in May, when Amazon rewired its assistant around two products: Alexa for Shopping and Alexa+. The redesigned assistant set the stage for ad formats that sit inside conversational shopping moments rather than alongside search results or product pages.

For advertisers, the move addresses a growing problem. As shoppers delegate product questions to AI assistants, the traditional levers of paid placement — sponsored listings, display units — reach fewer conversations. Branded Conversations inserts marketers into the moment a shopper taps a prompt and expects an answer.

The format also signals how Amazon intends to monetize generative AI shopping. Rather than charging brands simply to appear in responses, Amazon is selling influence over the response itself, tying ad spend directly to the assistant's conversational output.

Amazon announced the product at UnBoxed, its annual advertising conference, alongside an audience of marketers and agency buyers. The company has not yet detailed pricing or rollout timing in the material released.

The launch positions Amazon ahead of rivals racing to commercialize AI assistants. If consumers adopt Alexa+ and Alexa for Shopping at scale, Branded Conversations could become the first large-scale test of whether advertisers will pay to script the answers an AI assistant gives.