Amazon’s advertising business posted another blockbuster quarter, with revenue rising 26% year over year to $19.8 billion, reinforcing the company’s position as one of the world’s fastest-growing advertising platforms even as it pushes aggressively into artificial intelligence-driven marketing.

The growth rate comfortably outpaced Amazon’s North American retail business, which grew 16%, and its international operations, which expanded 15%, underscoring the increasing importance of advertising to the company’s broader business model.

CEO Andy Jassy highlighted advertising as one of Amazon’s strongest-performing businesses, alongside cloud computing and artificial intelligence, as the company reported overall revenue of $200.6 billion for the quarter.

“Advertising had another strong quarter with 26% year-over-year growth,” Jassy said in the earnings release.

But beyond the headline number, Amazon’s latest results reveal how rapidly the advertising business itself is evolving.

The company is increasingly integrating artificial intelligence across both consumer shopping experiences and advertiser tools. During the quarter, Amazon expanded Ads Agent, an AI-powered platform designed to simplify campaign planning, launch and optimisation. According to the company, advertisers using the tool are seeing an 8% reduction in cost per impression and a 6% drop in customer-acquisition costs.

The development signals a major shift in how advertising campaigns may be created in the future.

Traditionally, campaign planning has involved media agencies, manual audience targeting and complex optimisation processes. Amazon is betting that AI agents will increasingly automate many of those tasks, reducing campaign setup times from hours to minutes.

At the consumer end, Amazon is also transforming the shopping journey itself.

The company merged its AI shopping assistant Rufus with Alexa+ to create Alexa for Shopping, a conversational assistant capable of offering personalised recommendations, comparing products, tracking prices and even automating purchases. Amazon said customers using Alexa for Shopping spend more than 40% more per order than those who do not.

For marketers, that raises profound questions about the future of advertising.