Andy Jassy opened the ads part of Amazon's earnings call by answering a question
By Liran Hirschkorn · October 31, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Andy Jassy opened the ads part of Amazon's earnings call by answering a question nobody asked.
"The natural question is whether agentic shopping from external horizontal agents is meaningfully impacting Amazon Ads, and the answer is no. Few customers are doing much shopping this way yet, as the experience is still not great nor more convenient than coming to a retailer directly to research or one-click order there."
Notice the word "yet."
He also said Amazon anticipates working with outside agents. But he believes Alexa for Shopping, which 400 million people used this year, "is going to be the primary shopping agent customers use to shop Amazon."
Q3 ad revenue was $19.64B, up 11%. Wall Street expected $20.82B. Amazon points to Prime Day moving to June as the reason. Q4 guide: high teens.
So outside agents don't hurt Amazon's ads today. Amazon will let them in, and it's building the agent it expects most shoppers to use.
That agent reads your listing before the shopper does. Brands need to think about listings written both for the person and the agent talking to the person.
Is Andy right about the current state of agentic shopping? Will Amazon follow Walmart’s lead by connecting Alexa shopping to outside agents as a way to inject ads into outside agents?