Amazon’s AI ad engine: Q1 ad sales rose 24% to $17.2 billion as automation and first-party data power full-funnel buys.

85% of healthcare orgs plan to boost agentic AI spending and expect near-term savings. Amazon has the technical edge, but may face an uphill battle against entrenched healthcare vendors.

AWS' new AI tool reformats live broadcasts for TikTok and Reels in seconds, unlocking scalable ad inventory.

Capital One is reportedly exploring alternatives to its AWS cloud contract because of rising AI costs.

Samsung Ads announced an integration with Amazon Publisher Cloud that connects Samsung’s advertising system with Amazon’s in-depth ad data tools. Ad campaigns can now deliver broader reach and more relevant messaging by pairing Samsung’s Smart TV audience data with Amazon’s streaming, shopping, and browsing insights. As the CTV and Smart TV spaces rapidly expand, advertisers still struggle to reach viewers with the same level of targeting and measurement available on digital platforms. Brands operating within Samsung’s ad ecosystem can now tap into Amazon’s advanced audience insights to more precisely reach consumers who may have previously overlooked their ads.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will enable Visa Intelligence in its marketplace, bringing agentic commerce capabilities to AWS’s merchant list, per a press release. However, US consumers still have trepidation about letting bots complete purchases on their behalf—almost 70% of US adults are uninterested in testing out AI shoppers, per an EMARKETER and Civic Science survey. Major payment players hoping to benefit from agentic-driven volume need to develop incentives or roll out education materials to assure consumers that bot-driven shopping is safe and effective.

A minor technical failure took down Amazon Web Services (AWS) for several hours. Disrupted financial apps reportedly included Chime, Coinbase, and Venmo. Some financial institutions (FIs) were also reportedly affected.A mistake in a digital transformation project or a poor choice of vendor can have far-reaching consequences for a bank’s customer relationships and compliance with recordkeeping regulations. The solution for banks that can afford it has been redundancy through hybrid deployments to the cloud and on-premise.

Amazon is expanding its Prime Video live sports push through major deals with the National Basketball Association (NBA). For advertisers, the betting landscape, combined with mounting options to advertise in live sports, offers opportunities to connect with highly engaged and passionate audiences as platforms expand.

Amazon Ads has unveiled an agentic AI tool inside Creative Studio, designed to serve as a real-time creative partner for advertisers. Through a conversational interface, brands can brainstorm, storyboard, and generate professional-quality video and display ads in hours instead of weeks—at no extra cost. Powered by AWS models like Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude, the system combines retail insights with automation to democratize high-quality ad creation once limited to big-budget brands. Early testers, including Nestlé Health Science, praised its ability to surface new insights and scale campaigns, underscoring how platforms like Amazon, Meta, and Google are redefining advertising.

The news: Cohere wants to ease enterprise concerns around AI adoption with the launch of North, its new flagship platform. North is a privately deployable agentic platform that lets companies create, manage, and deploy AI agents entirely behind their own firewall. Our take: With the frenetic pace of AI model launches and the pressure for quick enterprise adoption, data governance and security can’t be an afterthought. Platforms like North give enterprises a path to adopt powerful AI tools without giving up control over sensitive information.

The news: OpenAI is bringing its newest models to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the first time, marking a major milestone in the ongoing battle for AI cloud dominance. Its open-weight models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b—available via Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker AI platforms—are able to handle complicated text-based operations and integrate into cloud-based systems. Our take: OpenAI’s models are getting easier to access, meaning lower costs and fewer technical hurdles to trying powerful AI tools. AWS customers should start testing oss-120b and oss-20b for things like generating subject lines, social copy, and campaign variations and explore ways to fine-tune the models with company data.

The news: Amazon reported strong Q2 results for its advertising business, with advertising revenues reaching $15.6 billion—up a significant 23% YoY. Net sales increased 13% YoY to $167.7 billion, well above Q2 guidance that warned of “tariffs and trade policies” and “recessionary fears.” Our take: Moving forward, Amazon will need to innovate what it’s already offering by pioneering a retail media strategy that extends Amazon’s data and ad tech beyond its own storefront, AI-driven tools that simplify creative production and optimization at scale while prioritizing privacy, and more immersive and shoppable ad formats in its streaming offering.

The news: Amazon Web Services (AWS) will launch an agentic AI marketplace designed to help enterprises browse and install AI agents from a variety of startups from a one-stop shop. Our take: The AWS agent marketplace could become a high-value channel for both discovering and distributing automation tools. Enterprises already on AWS’ platform should consider exploring new agent integrations, while startups have a chance to get in front of decision-makers before the market gets even more crowded.

By snapping up staff and software without a full buyout, Google may have found a gray zone. Regulators want to know if it’s a loophole or a land grab.

Custom AI agents are booming, but power and capacity shortfalls are slowing Microsoft’s expansion, threatening to delay broader adoption and inflate cloud costs.

Amid high costs and tariff risks, Amazon’s pause on colocation reflects a move to prioritize flexibility, control, and long-term scalability.

It cancels a $1 billion US data center plan and pauses other developments as it braces for rising material costs and geopolitical pressures.

A nearly $1 trillion loss in a day signals market panic. Apple leads the fall, with ripple effects threatening AI growth, ad revenue, and cloud service pricing.

Meta’s CTO claims nimbleness trumps incumbency in AI. However, Meta’s AI future still depends on the health of its core ad business.

Its biggest acquisition ever arms Google Cloud with elite multi-cloud security, setting it up to rival Azure and cash in on rising AI security demand.