AI-Ready CMO
Amazon's shopping agent now texts you, with Sponsored Products in the replies
The ads are free to advertisers for now. Amazon says more than 400 million customers have used the agent.
Sponsored by
Halfway there, folks.
The most personal thread on your customer's phone is about to get a sponsor.
Amazon's shopping agent, Alexa for Shopping, now takes orders by text. It went live on November 6 for a small, invite-only group of U.S. customers, and Amazon plans to open it to millions more over the coming weeks, Digiday reports.
Customers get a contact called "Alexa Shopping" and text it like anyone else in their phone. Restock the coffee pods. Find a gift that'll get there before the party.
When the agent texts back a set of options, a Sponsored Product can be one of them. It's free to advertisers for now. Purchases the agent completes on its own stay ad-free.
Look at where Amazon drew that line. Ads while you're still choosing, none once the agent's buying. I think that's the right instinct, and it tells you Amazon knows how this could go wrong. An ad inside a purchase the agent made on its own would be hard to explain to a customer.
Amazon says more than 400 million customers have used Alexa for Shopping in the past 12 months, and that use of its agentic features has grown more than eightfold since January. Those are its own numbers for the whole product. The texting part is days old.
If this works, three things change for you.
The shelf shrinks to what fits in a text reply.
Memory starts to matter. Digiday says the agent keeps a running tally of preferences, so your bid has to get past what it already knows about the shopper.
And measurement gets murkier. "As agentic commerce meets advertising, the definition of an impression is critical as well as the reporting and measurement," independent ad tech consultant Jonathan D'Sousa-Rauto told Digiday.
Before this costs you anything, ask your Amazon rep how placements get chosen and what gets reported. Then read your listings the way someone texting would. Asking whether it'll arrive by the weekend is a delivery question. Does your page answer it?
When your product turns up in someone's texts, will you be able to tell whether the ad sold it?
ALSO TODAY
Bolt has signed with Searchable to track how often AI chatbots recommend its rides across five markets, PPC Land reports.
Google's AI Mode is showing pop-ups that ask searchers to connect more Google apps for Personal Intelligence, per Search Engine Roundtable.
Tripadvisor took a $369.5 million writedown on its hotels and advertising business, citing "changes in the search landscape," SEJ reports.
Today’s sponsor:
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Even the one repetitive task you've been meaning to fix can now run itself, no code required. Customers using it are already seeing the difference.
This isn't the CRM you have to work hard to figure out. It's the one already working before you log in.
TALK ON THE MARKET
Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo at AppSumo, on the report he stopped reading:
The $64,320 from Google search he cites is his own number, and the rest of the thread gives away the setup. The useful part is the cap. If your agent's weekly report needs a meeting to interpret, you've built another report.
NUMBERS MATTER
71%. UK brand marketers who say AI is creating a new complexity problem, despite improving efficiency for their teams, in a report from SBS, per Marketing Week. And 57% say accessing and adopting marketing technology is harder than a year ago.
Marketing Week's summary gives no sample size or method and doesn't say who SBS is, so treat it as a mood reading. The mood is a team that got faster and got more to manage.
TRY THIS TODAY
Find out which customer data actually predicts a sale, before you pay to collect more.
Using the attached CRM field export and closed-won and closed-lost report, profile field completeness and duplicates and show which fields actually correlate with closed-won deals.
Then recommend the three fields most worth enriching and the fields we can stop collecting.Paste in: a CRM field export, an anonymized contact sample and a closed-won and closed-lost report. You get back: a completeness and duplicate check, the fields that track with revenue and a short list to enrich. The full Data Enrichment Workflow adds vendor research, scoring and CRM connectors.
CMO CORNER
Your involvement should shrink as your system matures.
Every new ad surface tempts a leader back into the weeds. You want to see the placements, approve the copy, sit in on the agency call. For a free test in a brand-new channel, that feels responsible.
It also doesn't scale. If an agent decides what appears in a text thread, you can't review each decision, and neither can your team. What you can do is stop being the approval step.
So start with your own calendar. Look back at last month's retail media decisions that waited on you, and pick the one your team could have made alone. Hand it over this week, by name, in front of the team.
Ask to hear about exceptions only. Each quarter, take another item off your approval list. If nothing breaks, you were the bottleneck.
TOOL UPGRADE
Three tools for keeping up as customers talk to you on more channels:
Watermelon — best for retail and e-commerce teams fielding repetitive order and returns questions, with a clean handoff to a person. Try Watermelon here →
Lindy — best for marketing ops teams without engineers that want an AI assistant connected to all their tools. Try Lindy here →
Vista Social — best for growth teams managing multiple brand accounts that want scheduling, analytics and AI content in one place. Try Vista Social here →
→ We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
LEARN THIS
The AI Integration Planning Framework for Martech is our method for assessing your stack, finding the AI opportunities that matter and rolling them out in phases. Use it when every platform is adding an AI surface and you need an order of operations.
First step this week: start the inventory. List each tool with its function, annual cost, active users, data integrations and existing AI features, then score your readiness from 1 to 5 across data, talent, budget, executive alignment and team capability.
→ We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more on AI marketing for free. Browse our learning resources for free.
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