A little-known fact about Amazon: advertising is a $60 billion annual business for the company, responsible for more than 9% of its overall revenue. That’s no small feat in an enterprise that also includes the market-leading cloud platform and the world’s largest online retail site.
This week, the company made a new bid to boost that advertising business with the unveiling of agentic AI technologies designed to act as a “creative director” for sellers and brands — generating ads informed by market research, consumer behavior, and Amazon’s data.
What does this mean for the future of creativity? That’s our topic on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast with Jay Richman, the Amazon vice president of product and technology who leads the team responsible for the company’s Creative Studio advertising tools.
Richman said the biggest gains from AI will come not from replacing people, but from amplifying the skills of those who are already experts. He compared it to engineering, where AI is turning “10x engineers into 100x engineers.”
The same dynamic applies to advertising and media, he said.
“The best creatives are able to get the most out of the tools,” Richman said. “The best photographs are still being produced by professionals. The best art is still being produced by artists, and that hasn’t changed in hundreds of years.”
He sees AI as a “new canvas, a new paintbrush” that will enable entirely new art forms.
Richman, based in New York, was in Seattle this week for Amazon’s Accelerate seller conference, where he announced the new agentic AI for Amazon’s Creative Studio on stage. His career has tracked the evolution of digital media, from early apps for the Palm Pilot to the first wave of streaming at NBC Universal, and the reinvention of podcast ads at Spotify.
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Related stories and links
- Amazon unveils new agentic AI tools for sellers amid heightened scrutiny
- The New Yorker: A.I. Is Coming for Culture
- Jay Richman unveils the new AI creative tools at Amazon Accelerate.
- Sold on Walmart, sent by Amazon: The weird new world of online retail
- After years of backlash, Amazon ends practice that sellers loathe
Audio editing by Curt Milton.
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