Amazon’s advertising business generated 19.8 billion dollars in the second quarter, up 26 percent year over year, and the number that should worry competitors is not the top line. It is where the growth is coming from: shoppers who click a Sponsored Prompt inside Alexa+ convert 48 percent more often and spend 21 percent more than shoppers who do not, according to Amazon.
What happened: CEO Andy Jassy credited Sponsored Products as Amazon’s largest ad offering and biggest growth driver, but the company’s own release leans hardest on agentic and conversational shopping inside Alexa+ and Alexa for Shopping, plus an Ads Agent tool that Amazon says cuts campaign cost per impression by 8 percent and cost per acquisition by 6 percent for advertisers who use it, and which expanded to 11 new countries this year. Streaming and live sports remain a second growth lane: multi-sport advertisers get 2.3 times the reach of single-sport buys, and Amazon says inventory across Thursday Night Football, the NBA, WNBA, and NASCAR sold out.
Why it matters: Amazon is the clearest evidence yet that agentic commerce is not a future ad format, it is already a measured, budgeted line item inside a public earnings report, arriving in the same reporting cycle as Alphabet’s AI bidding tools becoming standard in search advertising and alongside rivals folding AI tooling into their own streaming ad inventory.
The original insight: Amazon is publishing conversion lift numbers for agent-assisted shopping, not just adoption stats, which means advertisers can now build a business case for agentic ad formats on Amazon’s own disclosed data rather than a vendor pitch deck. Media buyers should ask Amazon reps for the underlying Sponsored Prompt eligibility criteria now, before every competitor asks the same question next quarter.
Source: About Amazon
