Amazon launches agentic Creative Agent tool in UK
Amazon has rolled out its new agentic advertising tool in the UK, France, Germany and Spain.
Creative Agent, which launched in the US in November, offers advertisers a conversational generative AI “creative partner” that can conduct product and audience research, brainstorm creative ideas, storyboard visuals, and produce video and display ads that can be placed across Amazon Ads’ portfolio, including on Prime Video and Twitch. It is currently available to advertisers at no added cost.
The agent is capable of creating a visual ad campaign from scratch “within the span of an afternoon”, according to a spokesperson.
The product is powered by Amazon’s retail insights, including customer shopping data, and generates creative assets based on links to brands’ Amazon pages, external websites, or uploaded assets.
Use of assets generated by the Creative Agent is, notably, limited to use on Amazon’s own platform; its terms of service require advertisers not use the creative off Amazon properties.
Amazon Ads previously debuted a more limited AI Video Generator for advertisers on its retail site in the UK last November. Creative Agent builds on that tool’s capabilities by adding agentic features and expanding the available inventory for generative AI outputs.
The launch follows the development of a number of similar tools from other media owners, including broadcasters Sky, ITV, Channel 4, NBCUniversal and Disney as well as agency groups, like WPP and Stagwell.
All such AI tools have been billed as a way for advertisers to reduce the time and cost associated with designing creative ads and planning campaigns. By removing such barriers to entry, media owners are betting they can increase investment from among the long tail of advertisers.
Such an embrace of AI for creative purposes has seemingly contributed to job losses at creative agencies. According to the latest IPA Agency Census, employment at UK creative agencies fell by 14.3% in 2025, with 8% of agencies reporting they reduced their workforce in the past 12 months as a “direct result” of AI. A quarter (24%) of agencies expect to do the same in the next year.
“With Creative Studio, we’re breaking down barriers of cost and time, and giving advertisers and agencies the same kind of strategic, high-quality creative support that once only large brands could access,” commented Amazon Ads UK managing director Phil Christer. “And this is just the beginning—it’ll continuously get better over time.”
‘High quality creative’ as a ‘starting line’
Demonstrating the Creative Agent tool to The Media Leader, Jenny Liu, a senior project manager at Amazon responsible for leading Creative Agent’s development, stated that its goal is to “democratise creative excellence”. She argued: “Small brands are basically locked out of the most powerful advertising screens, and large brands are also constrained by their ability to scale and ot iterate and experiment to improve performance.”
“High quality creative,” she added, should be a “starting line” for every advertiser, not a “finish line that only a few can reach.”
The Creative Agent responds to basic conversational requests; Liu insisted users need not learn “prompt engineering” to get the most out of the tool. In response to user prompts, it can generate creative components including visuals, music, voiceovers and text overlays, which users can edit.
The agent is designed to be “transparent at every stage” about what and how it generates its outputs, and, according to Liu, “the bulk of the creative development process involves interaction between the user and the agent”. Each stage of the creative process, she said, is intended to be iterative, with multiple options generated for users to pick from.
Liu told The Media Leader that, while the tool was originally developed for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), large brands and creative agencies have been “surprisingly engaged” during testing.
Lack of transparency around sustainability, business plan
Given that such a video generation tool is likely to be highly energy intensive — especially as it is free to use for any of the millions of Amazon advertisers in the US and Europe, and it can generate a technically unlimited number of assets — The Media Leader asked Amazon whether it had conducted due diligence on its potential impact on carbon emissions.
Liu initially replied that “sustainability is a really important, and it’s something that Amazon takes really seriously.” Given the company’s scale, she noted Amazon is one of the world’s largest purchasers of renewable energy and claimed Amazon “has matched all the energy used in operations, including data centres, with renewable energy in 2023 and 2024”.
The Media Leader asked again whether there was any transparency available to advertisers interested in using the tool, as to how much carbon it might use for an average campaign. Liu said: “I don’t have an answer for you on that right now, but that’s something we’d be happy to follow up with.”
When asked to follow up, a spokesperson for Amazon told The Media Leader that Amazon “does not provide specific energy usage information” for Creative Agent, and reiterated a number of steps the company is taking to “build one of the largest portfolios of carbon-free energy” and meet its Climate Pedge goal of being net-zero by 2040.
Other common concerns around AI use for advertising at this scale include copyright infringement, moderation of output, and the current backlash among consumers to ads that use AI.
Liu told The Media Leader Amazon trained its Creative Agent on “responsibly-sourced data that is in line with our advertiser terms of use” — a “diverse set of data sources” inclusive of “licensed content, proprietary data and relevant public data sets.”
She added that, for advertisers considering creating AI ads, it “really comes down to the brand themselves and where they stand on AI and whether they’re willing to experiment with it.”
She continued: “For us, because our north star is to produce the highest quality creative that we can, those brands help shape how we make our assets. […] As a user, as a brand, they are in control when they use Creative Agent.”
With Creative Agent free and rolled out at scale, how does the product fit into Amazon’s broader advertising strategy?
“We think that the more advertisers that get to participate in high-quality advertising, the bigger and better the market will be,” Liu said.
When asked whether Amazon would ever require payment to use the tool, she replied: “That’s not in the plan right now.”