The rise of retail media has seen demand for ad content to skyrocket; formats, form factors, time-of-day messaging and quasi-individual targeting all mean that the volume of ad content has grown exponentially.
Naturally, AI holds the key as it now offers the ability to create ultra-realistic content at scale and almost instantly as demand dictates. While the next step is likely to be that the AI looks at the data, looks at the target the ad needs to achieve and autonomously creates it, for now human in-put is still needed.
But how humans now interact with AI to generate that creative has also taken an interesting step forward. On the face of it, Amazon Ads announcement last week that its new agentic AI tool, Creative Agent, “empowers UK advertisers to easily create professional-quality ads for campaigns” isn’t all that remarkable. What is interesting is how it works.
Within Creative Studio, advertisers can now click “chat” to access a conversational, AI-powered creative partner that conducts product and audience research, brainstorms ideas, develops creative concepts in storyboard format and produces compelling video and display ads.
Developing sophisticated ad creative traditionally requires significant budget and resources, often tens of thousands of pounds and weeks of time. Creative Agent acts like a creative partner and strategist at your fingertips, helping advertisers of all sizes produce polished, professional-quality ads in just hours – at no additional cost – unlocking the same creative edge once reserved for the biggest brands.
Creative Agent is powered by Amazon’s extensive retail insights, which enable an in-depth understanding of the advertiser’s brand and products, including what features make a product stand out. By combining customer shopping signals with information from the advertiser’s product pages, brand store, and website, the tool generates ideas that bring a brand to life and designs ad creative that will resonate most with customers.
“This is about more than speed – it’s about giving every advertiser and agency access to the kind of strategic, high-quality creative support that once only large brands could afford,” said Phil Christer, Managing Director of Amazon Ads UK at the product’s launch at unBoxed London 2026 last week. “With Creative Agent, businesses can explore bold ideas, collaborate in real time, and bring professional ads to life – always on, at no extra cost.”
Building on this, Amazon also launched Ads Agent, an AI assistant with an expanding set of skills that enables advertisers to use plain-English requests to carry out complex advertising tasks and Campaign Manager, which brings together Amazon’s advertising console and Amazon DSP into a single ad platform.
How Creative Agent works in practice
Let’s say a retailer for outdoor gear releases a new backpack and wants to promote the new product. The retailer can simply go to Creative Studio, click “chat,” and Creative Agent begins by asking for product webpages, Amazon product detail pages, relevant audiences, brand guidelines, and previous brand ads or images.
The tool researches this information and responds with several options for ad concepts and taglines, explaining how the concepts were conceived, what the visuals will look like and what the message conveys to shoppers.
The retailer can select from one of the three proposed taglines and ad ideas that fit the brand’s voice, or have the tool start again and generate entirely new options.
Once a concept is agreed upon, the tool creates storyboards with scene-level scripts and visuals that can be edited, iterated and refined. It explains what it’s doing at every step so the advertiser can make edits to even the most minor detail.
Then, finalising the entire ad creation process, Creative Agent builds multi-scene videos and display ads complete with animations, music and voiceovers that can run across Sponsored Brands, Streaming TV, Sponsored Display, Amazon DSP and Brand Stores.
Enhancing advertiser creativity and control
Amazon Ads intentionally designed Creative Agent to interact with advertisers and showcase its thinking at every step of the ad creation process. Early beta testers reported the conversational workflow enhances their own capabilities and creative innovation.
“What truly sets this apart is how it explains its thought process as it’s building my creative concept,” says Dayexi Tomko, Brand Manager, Nestle Health Science. “Not only does this help expand my own perspective, but it consistently reveals insights and angles I hadn’t considered that are based on the products I sell.”
This tool reduces the time and cost of designing creative ads, encouraging advertisers to explore and experiment rapidly.
“This tool allows us to develop creative ads and scale campaigns for our mid-market clients in ways that simply weren’t possible before,” says Destaney Wishon, CEO of BTR Media. “The ability to quickly iterate and produce professional-quality ads dramatically changes what we can offer to clients on mid-market level budgets.”
“AI is advancing at an incredible pace,” says Phil Christer, Managing Director of Amazon Ads UK. “With Creative Studio, we’re breaking down barriers of cost and time, and giving advertisers and agencies the same kind of strategic, high-quality creative support that once only large brands could access. And this is just the beginning – it’ll continuously get better over time.”
What it means for retail media and beyond
Of course, while there is much to be gained from this level of automation, there are downsides. As it becomes more widespread there is always the risk of homogenisation: the same AI and same data feed could lead to less individual creative. There is a lot of data flowing from Amazon, so it may not be a problem, but it is one area to keep an eye on.
So too is its potential impact on agencies. If AI can generate content, scripts, storyboards and generate the finished ad, the role of an agency becomes less well defined. Here they may well have to shift their value to that of brand strategy, cross-platform orchestration and measurement framework.
This has big implications for retail media. In the Creative Agent world, retail media creative is built from product data, optimised against conversion signals and shaped by shopper behaviour. This collapses the distance between brand storytelling and sales activation in an instant. In this world, retail media stops being just ‘performance advertising on retailer sites’ and becomes a commerce-native brand building environment.
The logical next step is that AI reads performance data, understands business objectives and autonomously generates, deploys and optimises creative. At that point creative becomes adaptive infrastructure and retail media becomes partially – and increasingly – autonomous. And that fundamentally changes media planning and creative workflows.
