Bloomberg Surveillance · Tuesday, September 22, 2026
The rise of AI agents, capable of filling shopping carts, poses a significant challenge to the current advertising models of companies like Amazon. While advertising has moved closer to transactions, agentic AI fundamentally questions how targeted advertisements will function when an agent is the intermediary.
“It's a great question, and it's in a debate we've been having with investors over the last 48 hours for sure. Look, we've had advertising move closer to the transaction. If you think back to 2021 when Apple changed its tracking mechanisms, Advertising really moved closer to the transaction. The view was if you could see the transaction, then it is an effective piece of advertising, right? This challenges this. AI search was early in its challenges, but agentic really does challenge this. We think all of these companies will... to varying degrees of success, have to navigate this new paradigm. But absolutely, we do believe that there will be some impact on retail media advertising.”