Amazon’s Latest Challenge: When Bots Do the Buying
WSJ Tech News Briefing

Amazon’s Latest Challenge: When Bots Do the Buying

B2Upper-intermediateNovember 4, 20268 min
  • Technology

People are adopting AI agents to research and buy products—and that’s putting Amazon’s $70 billion advertising business at risk. WSJ’s Isabella Simonetti breaks down why bots that can shop pose such a threat to the e-commerce giant, and how Amazon is fighting back. Julie Chang hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Amazon has been the online shopping destination for decades now. And being America's go-to

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a new threat that could be putting those ad dollars at risk. AI agents. Take Meta's

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0:00

Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Wednesday, November 4th. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. Amazon has been the online shopping destination for decades now. And being America's go-to virtual shop has helped it rake in tens of billions of ad revenue annually. But there's

0:23

a new threat that could be putting those ad dollars at risk. AI agents. Take Meta's which has signed up millions of users since its launch in September. But why are these virtual assistants posing such a problem for Amazon? Here to break it all down is WSJ reporter Isabella Simonetti.

0:43

Isabella, let's start with, how big is Amazon's ad business? Amazon's ad business is one of the company's biggest cash cows and it brought in almost $70 billion in revenue last year. There are a variety of different ways that Amazon makes money off of advertisements,

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