The Road to Agentic Marketing: Skai at Amazon Ads unBoxed 2021-2025

• Across five consecutive Amazon Ads unBoxed events, we identified major industry shifts early. These included retail media’s expansion and the rise of generative and agentic AI.
• In 2022, we saw Amazon’s announcements as a signal that retail media was evolving beyond the digital shelf. The broader industry subsequently embraced a more expansive model spanning onsite media, streaming, offsite activation, measurement, and physical environments.
• In 2023 and 2024, we anticipated that AI would play a larger role across the advertising workflow. It would help scale creative, simplify insights, and support smarter full-funnel decisions.
• In 2025, we identified the next transition: AI moving from insight to action. Human oversight and strong governance will remain essential as agentic capabilities advance.

Amazon Ads unBoxed is built around product announcements, but the most valuable signal often comes from the direction connecting them.

Since 2021, we have used our annual unBoxed perspective to look beyond individual releases and consider what Amazon’s announcements reveal about the advertising industry’s broader trajectory.

Some of those shifts were already taking shape. Others were early signals of what would become a much larger industry priority. Across retail media, full-funnel advertising, generative AI, and agentic execution, the direction has become clearer with each passing year.

Here is how those signals developed and what we believe marketers should watch next.

2021: Data starts becoming a marketing intelligence layer

At Amazon unBoxed 2021, Amazon expanded access to Amazon Marketing Cloud and introduced new approaches to brand lift and incrementality measurement. The announcements pointed to a growing role for customer and campaign data in understanding how advertising performs and where it can improve.

Skai was already moving in that direction. Our work around AMC explored how Amazon’s customer and campaign signals could feed into bidding and campaign optimization, while our work on incrementality examined how marketers could connect paid media to organic search, video, and broader business outcomes.

The idea was straightforward: the more useful data marketers could bring together, the more informed their advertising decisions could become. That premise would become a recurring theme in Skai’s unBoxed perspectives as Amazon expanded from richer data and measurement into broader retail media, AI-powered intelligence, and eventually agentic execution.

2022: Retail media moves beyond the digital shelf

At Amazon Ads unBoxed 2022, Amazon introduced 38 announcements spanning reach, addressability, creative, measurement, and optimization. Sponsored Display opened opportunities for brands that did not sell through Amazon. Digital Signage Ads extended retail media into physical stores. Streaming TV measurement connected retail data with broader video investments, while Amazon Marketing Cloud enhancements made audience insights more accessible and actionable.

Taken together, these announcements pointed to a broader definition of retail media. We saw that direction early, describing unBoxed 2022 as a potential watershed moment for the channel, with implications that extended well beyond Amazon and the digital shelf.

Our broader interpretation of retail media subsequently became more visible across the industry. Retail media grew beyond onsite sponsored listings to encompass display, streaming television, offsite activation, physical environments, and opportunities for non-endemic advertisers. Commerce data became valuable across the customer journey, not only at the point of purchase.

2023: Generative AI becomes a practical advertising engine

At Amazon Ads unBoxed 2023, Amazon put greater emphasis on AI across the advertising experience, including generative AI for creative and new ways to use AMC insights. In our unBoxed 2023 video recap, Skai leaders leaders focused on where those capabilities could create practical value for marketers.

We anticipated that generative AI would help advertisers create assets at scale, particularly for brands managing large product catalogs. We also highlighted machine learning’s potential to make audience creation and AMC insights more efficient and accessible, including helping advertisers generate insights without needing to write code.

Our perspective extended beyond content generation. We connected AI-powered creative, audience intelligence, measurement, and Amazon’s growing media reach. We expected those pieces to come together in 2024 and support broader full-funnel strategies.

We also argued that Amazon’s expansion across video, display, measurement, and programmatic media signaled that retail media’s future would be full-funnel and omnichannel.

That direction became increasingly visible in Amazon’s subsequent product development. Generative AI expanded into image, video, audience, and campaign-building tools. No-code and natural-language capabilities made sophisticated analysis available to more users. Amazon also strengthened the connections among sponsored ads, DSP, streaming television, and measurement.

The developments reflected the two directions Skai had identified in 2023: AI becoming useful across more parts of advertising and retail media extending into a broader full-funnel model.

2024: AI becomes a decision layer for full-funnel media

At unBoxed 2024, Amazon brought AI, data, streaming television, and full-funnel media into closer connection across its advertising offerings.

At the time, we anticipated that AI would play a deeper role in personalizing the customer journey and delivering relevant content throughout the funnel. We also expected the technology to provide faster insights and support more responsive decision-making as it became increasingly sophisticated.

We encouraged marketers to apply automation to bidding, optimization, and other repeatable work so their teams could spend more time on strategy. Our analysis of Amazon’s 2024 announcements highlighted an updated DSP experience, no-code AMC capabilities, AI-powered campaign and creative tools, new measurement systems, and audience bid boosting.

Together, these developments pointed toward a marketing environment in which AI would continuously support decisions across connected campaigns. Skai’s 2024 perspective anticipated AI becoming a more active part of planning and decision-making across the full funnel, with automation taking on more repeatable work so marketers could focus on strategy.

2025: AI moves from intelligence to action

Amazon’s unBoxed 2025 announcements gave substance to the direction Skai had identified a year earlier.  Campaign Manager brought sponsored ads and Amazon DSP into a more unified experience. Creative Agent expanded the role of generative AI in producing campaign-ready assets. Full-Funnel Campaigns applied AI to targeting, budget allocation, and optimization across sponsored ads, display, video, and streaming television. Ads Agent also introduced more conversational ways to build campaigns and work with AMC insights.

These developments showed AI moving deeper into planning and execution, while full-funnel media became easier to manage as a connected system. Campaign Manager, Creative Agent, Full-Funnel Campaigns, Complete TV, Ads Agent, and expanded AMC capabilities also pointed to a broader convergence across advertising. 

Creative could respond to campaign objectives. Measurement could influence optimization. Natural-language interfaces could make complex data easier to use. Streaming television could become more accountable to performance outcomes.

We also looked ahead to the next stage: AI-driven analytics turning measurement into foresight and connecting that intelligence with action. Our 2025 perspective anticipated a larger role for purpose-built AI agents, including interpreting AMC outputs, connecting them with performance data from other channels, and eventually helping marketers identify and execute appropriate next steps.

We are seeing the validation of this perspective more each day.The next phase of agentic AI in marketing will be defined by what happens after an insight is generated. The technology will increasingly help marketers identify the appropriate response, coordinate it across platforms, and execute within defined objectives, permissions, and business rules.

For enterprise marketers, agentic-powered advertising will require clear governance, explainable decisions, reliable data, and meaningful human oversight. The most valuable agents will combine greater autonomy with controls that keep marketers responsible for strategy and accountability.

2026: Governed agentic execution comes into focus

Amazon Ads unBoxed 2026 will take place September 28–30 in San Francisco. Amazon is highlighting AI-powered tools for campaign creation, optimization, and measurement.

Based on the progression of the previous years, we believe the next stage will involve AI agents supporting more of the campaign lifecycle, from planning and activation through optimization and measurement. Marketers will also need greater control over what agents can do, when they can act, and how their actions are reviewed.

We will also be watching how these capabilities connect with advertising outside Amazon’s ecosystem. Marketers operate across publishers, channels, accounts, and markets.As agents take on more work, their value will increasingly depend on their ability to work across the data and media infrastructure that supports those investments.

That will raise a broader question for enterprise marketers: what should they build, what should they buy, and how should they govern the agents working on their behalf? There will be no single path to agentic marketing. Some teams may use platform-native agents, while others may connect their own agents to existing marketing infrastructure.

Since 2022, Skai’s unBoxed perspectives have followed retail media from broader channel expansion to connected intelligence and AI-driven action. The next stage is governed agentic execution: technology that helps marketers put agents to work while preserving the visibility, approval, and control required to manage enterprise media.

See how Skai helps marketers bring AI agents into media workflows with the governance, visibility, and control needed to scale. Contact Skai to learn more.

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