Amazon Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Amazon says its agent makes high-quality ad production a breeze. The agent aims to give SMBs better advertising tools. It's accessible via a new "chat" feature in Creative Studio. Amazon has launched a new AI agent that automates virtually every step of the advertisement-production process, from audience research to ideation to storyboarding to the production of a short video ad. Also: In 2 years, half of all service calls will be resolved by AI - survey Amazon Ads -- the company's adtech division -- announced Wednesday that its new agentic AI tool is designed to help smaller brands tap into a level of ad production-quality that's traditionally only been accessible to their more deep-pocketed competitors. The agent is accessible via a new "chat" feature in Creative Studio and can be prompted to perform tasks using natural language instructions. "Creative Studio's powerful new AI tool 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," Amazon wrote in a press release. How it works Amazon is by far and away the world's largest e-commerce site, making it a vast repository of consumer data. The new agent from Amazon Ads essentially taps into this huge trove of information to help guide brands in their marketing efforts. "The new agentic AI tool 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," the company wrote in its press release. Amazon said the tool uses "customer shopper signals" to triangulate information from an advertiser's pages and website to come up with ad creative. The agent leverages a collection of AI models, including Amazon's family of Nova models and Anthropic's Claude, which "work in harmony" to generate custom ads, according to Amazon. Also: Stability's new AI audio tool creates custom sound for brands - how it works In addition to analyzing the nuances of a brand to suggest ad ideas, the agent can take additional steps by generating all of the key assets that go into a video ad, including multi-scene scripts and custom imagery, music, and voiceovers. Analogously to the meticulous feedback mechanisms built into reasoning models -- which write out the steps they take to arrive at a particular output -- Amazon's new agent is also designed to be transparent and communicative with users to optimize the quality of the final output. "It explains what it's doing at every step so the advertiser can make edits to even the most minor detail," Amazon wrote in the release. An outdoor gear retailer looking to sell a new backpack, for example, might click the "chat" function in Creative Studio and provide the agent with some basic information about the brand and the product, like the backpack's webpage, along with links to previous ads from the brand and its marketing guidelines. Credit: Amazon The agent might then respond with a few options for taglines and ad concepts, along with summaries outlining how it arrived at each idea and why each would be likely to resonate with the brand's audience. Also: The best AI image generators of 2025: Gemini, ChatGPT, Midjourney, and more Once the user selects a concept they'd like to run with, the agent might generate a script, some images, and other assets that can be fine-tuned as needed. From there, it would assemble all of the approved materials into a video that can be run across various marketing channels. How to try it Currently available in beta, the new AI agent is free for all Amazon Ads advertisers. Users can access it via Amazon's Creative Studio, where it's located in the Amazon Ads Ad Console. There is no minimum ad spend to use the tool. Augmentation vs. replacement It's a sales pitch that's become common among tech developers pushing generative AI tools onto creative industries: that these tools won't replace them, they'll simply augment human workforces with new capabilities while opening the door to a level of production quality that not so long ago would've been prohibitively expensive. Also: How agentic AI is transforming the very foundations of business strategy Companies building text-to-speech AI tools, for example, often assure voice actors that their technology will create new means of monetizing their talent -- even while many of those professionals argue that the technology could be trained on their voices without consent, and might also threaten their job security. Just last month, Anthropic settled a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by writers claiming the company had pirated their work to train its Claude chatbot. Developers behind AI-generated video models, similarly, often tell filmmakers that their tools will help to support and empower human filmmaking by democratizing access to technology that can create complex special effects quickly and cheaply. Similarly, while many marketers have fretted about the possibility that they'll eventually be displaced by AI, Amazon has been pushing out new brand-facing AI tools under the premise that these will support, not replace, the human touch. In June, the company announced the general US launch of its Video Generation tool, through which brands can generate short and realistic AI-generated video ads by uploading still images of products. Also: Google's new open protocol secures AI agent transactions - and 60 companies already support it Meta has likewise introduced a suite of AI tools for advertisers, and the company is reportedly working on its own plans to automate every step of the ad production process by the end of this year.