3 Ways Agentic AI is Transforming Retail Advertising

Shoppers today encounter ads almost everywhere — from social media feeds and TV commercials to grocery store displays. This creates tremendous opportunities for retail marketers, but also presents a growing challenge. Managing touchpoints across channels such as video, audio, display, and sponsored ads while keeping creatives timely and on-brand has become incredibly complex. Each new channel adds versions, briefs and deadlines, making it difficult for even large teams to stay seasonally and culturally relevant. Marketing teams struggle under this pressure, not because they lack creativity but because they're drowning in execution.

Agentic artificial intelligence is changing this equation. By streamlining and accelerating campaign workflows, it allows marketers to meet rising expectations without adding manual work. The goal is simple: enhancing human creativity so teams can bring their best ideas to life. The transformation isn't just about making ads faster or cheaper; it's about fundamentally changing who gets to participate in sophisticated advertising campaigns.

Here's how this approach is transforming retail advertising:

1. Creative That Moves at the Speed of Retail

Retail moves fast. Seasons change, promotions launch overnight, and micro-holidays appear constantly. Traditionally, adapting creative for any campaign — no matter how brief — required lengthy production cycles and significant manual effort. Teams would spend weeks preparing for a single promotional moment.

That dynamic has fundamentally changed. Agentic AI allows marketers to update messaging, visuals and promotional elements instantly while maintaining brand quality. We can see the impact from our data: A group of U.S.-based advertisers using AI creative solutions saw, on average, a 12 percent increase in sales per advertiser within one month.

Marketers can now generate tailored variations with simple instructions like "run a summer-sale version" or "refresh copy for back to school" without rebuilding assets from scratch.

2. Scaling a Single Spark Across Channels

Most retail campaigns start with a central idea or hero asset. Traditionally, each format, whether video, audio, display or social, required completely separate workflows. You would essentially rebuild the campaign multiple times, multiplying effort while fragmenting creative energy.

Agentic AI can convert a single concept into multiple formats efficiently. Like water adapting to any vessel, a single campaign idea reshapes itself for each format — video, display, audio, social — while its core message stays unmistakably intact. This capability enables retailers of every size to produce polished, relevant creatives without compounding production effort.

The democratization effect here is profound. Because barriers for entry are dropping, we're seeing much more diversity in the voices and perspectives represented in advertising. This is crucial for brands connecting with increasingly diverse audiences.

3. Creating Streaming TV Ads

Streaming TV is a powerful channel for awareness and brand storytelling, yet producing broadcast-quality creatives has traditionally been time consuming and expensive for many advertisers. The production costs, the expertise required, the time investment … it's all been prohibitive for smaller brands.

Agentic AI makes premium formats like streaming TV more accessible. Using existing brand assets and high-level guidance, marketers can generate streaming concepts efficiently. Combined with other channels, these assets support a full-funnel strategy without the traditional production burden.

This shift allows retail teams to focus on what they do best — understanding their customers, refining brand messages, and making strategic decisions — rather than getting bogged down in repetitive production tasks.

The Path Forward

Agentic AI reshapes creative workflows, making them faster, simpler and more adaptable. Advertisers can respond to trends in real time, scale ideas across channels, and participate in premium formats without added complexity.

But here's what I find most exciting: we're not simply developing technology for technology's sake. We're creating solutions that genuinely change which kinds of advertising campaigns can exist and who gets to create them. The small business owner selling handmade jewelry or artisanal coffee can now describe their product and customers to an AI system and walk away with multiple high-quality creative concepts tailored to different audiences.

The magic happens when you pair human creativity with AI capabilities. That's when brands truly connect with shoppers in meaningful ways. AI amplifies the creative craft by freeing marketers to focus on storytelling, strategy, and the ideas that set their brand apart.

That's where the real value lives.

Nikhil Nanivadekar is a principal engineer at Amazon Ads. He is pioneering generative AI solutions for Amazon Ads.