Amazon wants AI to run your ad budget, while facing a $20 billion lawsuit over ad pricing

The headline product is Full-Funnel Campaigns. Advertisers give Amazon a budget, their products, and their creative assets. Amazon's AI then handles the rest: running sponsored ads, display, video, and streaming TV together, automatically, aimed at winning new customers and driving long-term sales.

Why it matters: that's a real structural change. Advertisers used to have to run separate campaigns for upper-funnel brand awareness and lower-funnel sales pushes, managed as two different operations. This collapses that split into one AI-run system.

• Amazon Ads Agent: the overall AI layer covering planning through measurement.
• Full-Funnel Campaigns: one AI-managed campaign spanning every ad format at once.
• DVA+: consolidates display, TV and programmatic buying, with a simplified mode where you just set a budget and objective.

Amazon VP Kelly MacLean described DVA+ as "human-led AI supported," meaning advertisers can still keep manual control over targeting, deals, and bidding if they want it. The simplified version just lets someone skip all of that and let the AI decide.

Amazon exec Amit Bhattacharyya framed the whole push around one question: "What if we made it really simple, and yet very powerful for advertising?" For a small advertiser with no dedicated media-buying team, that pitch is genuinely appealing.

In real life think of it like handing a stranger your credit card and a rough idea of what you want to buy, then trusting them to shop wisely across every store in the mall at once. Convenient, if you trust the stranger.

The catch: in August 2026, the FTC and attorneys general from 22 states sued Amazon, alleging the company secretly inflated ad auction prices for more than seven years.

The complaint claims Amazon told over 500,000 advertisers it ran a fair "second-price" auction, where the winner pays just one cent more than the next-highest bid. Instead, the FTC alleges Amazon quietly added a hidden "soft reserve price" starting in 2019, and even used a fake bidder to push real prices higher than genuine competition would produce.

By the numbers: the share of the time advertisers ended up paying their full bid amount, rather than a competitive second-price rate, allegedly rose from 30-40% in 2021 to about 80% by 2024. The FTC estimates Amazon extracted more than $20 billion from advertisers this way. Amazon disputes the allegations.

What's next: when reporters at unBoxed asked whether the new consolidated AI tools would actually show advertisers how their auction prices get set, Amazon didn't commit to that level of transparency.

That's the uncomfortable overlap. Amazon is asking advertisers to trust an AI system with more control over ad spending, planning, and execution than ever before, at the exact moment regulators allege the company has spent years quietly manipulating how those same auctions work. More automation means less visibility into individual decisions, which makes the transparency question more urgent, not less.

Who's affected: small and mid-sized advertisers stand to gain the most convenience from these tools, since they're the ones least likely to have a dedicated team auditing bids and placements manually. They're also the ones with the least leverage to demand answers if something in the AI's decisions looks off.

By the numbers: Amazon's advertising revenue reached roughly $68.6 billion in 2025, and is projected to climb to about $82 billion in 2026. That puts Amazon's share of global digital ad spend at around 9%, up from 8% just two years earlier.

The big picture: Amazon, Google, and Meta together are expected to capture over 62% of all worldwide digital ad spending in 2026. All three companies are racing to fold AI more deeply into their ad platforms at the same time, betting that automation and first-party data are what keep advertisers locked into their ecosystems rather than shopping around.

That race is exactly why Amazon's timing matters here. A company this large, moving this much of its ad business toward AI-run automation, sets a template other platforms are likely to follow, regardless of how the FTC case plays out.

Coverage of the launch pointed to a few specific, practical worries from advertisers, beyond the lawsuit itself: how do you audit an AI's budget and creative decisions after the fact, will existing third-party tools still work with the newly consolidated systems, and will fees stay clear as everything gets folded into fewer, bigger platforms.

None of those questions have firm answers yet. Amazon's pitch is that consolidation makes advertising easier. The open question is whether it also makes it harder to spot problems buried inside a system with fewer visible moving parts.

Background: the FTC's complaint focuses on a specific mechanism: what Amazon allegedly called internally a "soft reserve price." A standard second-price auction is meant to reward genuine competition, the winner pays just barely more than the next real bidder, so advertisers only pay what the market actually demands.

The FTC alleges Amazon quietly inserted an artificial floor into that process starting in 2019, using what it describes as an "invented auction participant," essentially a fake bidder that existed only to push real advertisers' costs higher than authentic competition would produce. If proven, that would mean advertisers spent years being told they were getting a fair, competitive price when they weren't.

What's next: that allegation is central to why Amazon's new AI consolidation raises eyebrows. An opaque auction mechanism is one problem. Wrapping that same mechanism inside a more automated, harder-to-inspect AI system, right as regulators are scrutinizing exactly how transparent that mechanism has been, adds a second layer of the same underlying question: can advertisers actually verify they're being charged fairly.

• If you advertise on Amazon, these new AI tools will likely simplify campaign setup, but you'll have less visibility into exactly how your budget gets allocated.
• The FTC lawsuit is still ongoing and unresolved, so treat any claims about "fair" auction pricing with some skepticism until it plays out.
• More AI automation in ad platforms is a broader industry trend, not unique to Amazon, so expect similar consolidation from competitors.
• Ask specifically about auditability before handing more control to any AI ad system, whether it's Amazon's or someone else's.