Amazon has retired its longstanding ad-buying interface and replaced it with an AI-driven platform called Amazon Ads Agent, the company announced at its annual Unboxed advertising event in San Francisco.

The new platform replaces Amazon Ad Console, the interface advertisers have used for years to buy and manage campaigns. The move signals that Amazon now treats autonomous AI agents not as an add-on but as the operating core of its advertising business.

Kelly MacLean, VP of Amazon Ads, told ADWEEK that the change is not a rebrand. Agents have been fully integrated into the platform and into the workflows advertisers use every day, she said.

The foundation for this shift was laid last year. In 2024, Amazon launched a tool called Ads Agent, a chat-driven assistant that automated parts of the ad-buying process. It handled tasks such as managing targeting across campaigns and optimizing bids. Advertisers could describe what they wanted in natural language, and the agent executed the operational work behind the scenes.

That experiment has now become the product. The agentic experience that began as a辅助 tool now powers the entire ad platform. Every advertiser who logs in to buy Amazon inventory will work through an interface built around agents rather than traditional manual campaign controls.

The strategic logic is straightforward. Amazon manages advertising at a scale that makes manual optimization impractical for many advertisers, particularly smaller sellers who lack dedicated media teams. Agents that automate targeting and bidding decisions lower the barrier to running effective campaigns on Amazon's properties.

For the broader advertising industry, the announcement escalates the race among major ad platforms to embed AI agents into core buying workflows. Google, Meta and Amazon all now position automated, conversational systems as the primary way advertisers interact with their ad products. The platforms that make agentic tools genuinely capable of running campaigns end-to-end will shape how media buying is done.

The change also carries commercial weight for Amazon. Advertising is one of the company's fastest-growing revenue streams, and simplifying campaign management through agents could pull in more advertisers and increase spend from existing ones. Automating bid and targeting decisions gives Amazon's own systems more influence over where ad dollars go inside its ecosystem.

MacLean's emphasis that this is a full integration, not a rebrand, sets the bar for how the industry should judge the rollout. The test now is whether advertisers find the agent-driven workflows deliver better results than the Ad Console they replace — and whether other platforms follow Amazon's lead in making agents the default rather than the option.