Amazon unBoxed 2026 and Accelerate 2026: Amazon Shipped the Agents. It Did Not Ship Your Standard.

Amazon just spent one week putting an AI agent on each side of your business, and both of them run on Amazon's judgment until you say otherwise. On September 23, at Accelerate, Seller Assistant got a memory, a set of workflows that run while you are logged out, and a plugin that puts it inside Claude. On September 29, at unBoxed, the ads console and Amazon DSP stopped being two products and became one thing called Amazon Ads Agent, with campaign types that decide targeting, creative, and pacing for you.

Some of this is a straightforward gift. A free year of Amazon Quick Plus. A campaign type that bills you for reviews only when a buyer submits one. Streaming video without a DSP seat or anyone on staff who knows what a deal ID is. Some of it moves decisions you used to make into a system that will show you the result and keep the reasoning to itself. Both are true at once, which is roughly the point of this post.

Below: every announcement from both shows, what is live versus beta, the five things they have in common, and what to turn on, test, or put behind an approval gate before Q4 traffic arrives.

Quick Answer

• What launched at Accelerate: Seller Assistant now remembers your business and runs workflows on its own, a Selling Partner plugin brings it into Amazon Quick and (in beta) Claude, and every primary account holder gets 12 months of Quick Plus free.
• What launched at unBoxed: the console and Amazon DSP merged into Amazon Ads Agent, with three campaign types: Sponsored Ads, Full Funnel Campaigns, and DVA+ for display, video, and audio. Branded Conversations puts your brand inside multi-turn Alexa for Shopping chats from January 2027. Amazon's own write-up is on the Amazon Ads newsroom.
• Where the ads serve: Sponsored Ads on Amazon search, detail pages, and inside Alexa for Shopping. DVA+ and Full Funnel Campaigns across Amazon's home page, search, display, Prime Video, Fire TV, and the open internet, allocated by Amazon's models unless you switch to advanced settings.
• The opportunity: sellers who only buy search ads can reach video and streaming without programmatic experience, ASINs under 1,000 reviews get a paid review lever, and the Quick Plus year is real money.
• The risk: the default tier of every new product shows you where the money went, not the levers that sent it. Audience-level transparency, DVA+ fees and minimums, and the data terms for connecting your Walmart and Shopify accounts into Seller Central are all still unpublished.
• Our read: two agents, one owner. Both encode Amazon's judgment. The one thing not on either stage was your own operating standard, written down and running across all of it.

Accelerate 2026: Seller Assistant leaves the building

Accelerate ran September 22 to 24 in Seattle. We expected Seller Assistant to headline, and it did, in a bigger way than the session catalog let on. Amazon's announcement came from Mary Beth Westmoreland, VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, and it has four parts.

Seller Assistant remembers you now, and it works nights

Seller Assistant, the AI inside Seller Central, keeps a persistent memory of each seller's pricing patterns, inventory cycles, and growth goals. That memory follows you between Seller Central, Quick, and Claude, so you stop re-explaining your business every session. The bigger change is workflows. You describe what to watch in plain language (inventory cover on your top 50 ASINs, a competitor's price, account health warnings), set the guardrails, and pick whether the assistant recommends or acts. It runs whether you are logged in or not, and every action is logged. Westmoreland told Reuters it is free and optional, and that sellers choose how much they share.

Amazon says Seller Assistant has reached over 90% of its selling partners and that sellers accept its recommendations more than 90% of the time. Those are Amazon's numbers. The second one is either a sign the recommendations are good or a sign that most sellers say yes to whatever the console suggests. Amazon did not say which.

The Selling Partner plugin: Seller Central inside Claude

The plugin connects your listings, inventory, sales analytics, and performance metrics to an outside assistant, which can then draft and, with your approval, execute the same actions Seller Assistant takes inside Seller Central. It is generally available in Amazon Quick and in beta in Claude for sellers in Amazon's US stores, with international expansion promised without a date. Amazon says the connection takes about 60 seconds and no code. Westmoreland's line to GeekWire was that the goal is for sellers to never have to log into Seller Central at all.

Two boundaries worth knowing before you connect it: Vendor Central is out of scope, and advertising data is not in the plugin's announced coverage. If you were hoping to run Sponsored Products from a chat window this week, that is a different plugin and a different keynote.

A free year of Amazon Quick Plus

Every primary account holder worldwide can claim 12 months of Amazon Quick Plus free, plus two co-workers, by signing up before December 31, 2026. Quick is AWS's work assistant: documents, spreadsheets, research, and a Canvas workspace that pulls live seller data into planning. Pricing after the free year has not been announced, which is a sentence to remember in late 2027.

Other channels move into Seller Central, and Prime moves out of it

Amazon also announced that US sellers will be able to connect eBay, Shopify, TikTok Shop, and Walmart accounts to Seller Central, link listings, see orders in one place, and fulfill across channels, rolling out gradually at no extra cost. Amazon's supporting stat is that more than 95% of its independent sellers already sell somewhere else too. Separately, US merchants on Multi-Channel Fulfillment can now offer Prime delivery on off-Amazon orders. Read those two together and the shape is clear: Amazon would like to be the operating system for your Walmart business as well.

unBoxed 2026: the console and the DSP become one agent

unBoxed ran September 28 to 30 in San Francisco, keynote on the 29th. Thirteen announcements, three themes. The structural one comes first, because the naming touches everything after it.

One platform, three campaign types, two levels of control

The Amazon Ads console and Amazon DSP have been merged and renamed Amazon Ads Agent. Ads Agent, the chat assistant Amazon introduced at unBoxed 2025, is now the front door for the whole platform: it keeps context as you move between pages and campaign types, and Amazon told Digiday it is adding explanations for why it recommends a given targeting or budget change. AdExchanger reports that "Amazon DSP" is retired as a product name. The programmatic buy is now DVA, for display, video, and audio. Update your dashboards.

Three campaign types sit underneath the new name. Sponsored Ads are Sponsored Products, Brands, and Display, as before, now automatically eligible to serve inside Alexa for Shopping conversations. Full Funnel Campaigns take one budget and a product list, and Amazon's models handle targeting, creative generation, and pacing across sponsored and DVA inventory at once. Amazon's Amit Bhattacharyya told Adweek it was built for sellers who buy conversion-based search ads and want a way into awareness formats without running a second campaign structure. Reporting is format-level; audience transparency is, per Digiday, still in progress. Availability is muddled: Pacvue calls it open beta, Marketing Dive and Adweek say it is available to all US advertisers, and Amazon says more than 1,000 campaigns have run. We covered the original beta when it was announced. DVA+ is a four-step flow: pick an objective, pick products or a brand URL, review AI-generated creative, set a budget. Brand+ or Performance+ takes it from there. DVA+ with advanced settings restores what a programmatic buyer expects: manual targeting, publisher inclusion and exclusion lists, frequency caps, format-level budgets, deal activation. DVA+ is in extended closed beta in the US, invoice-only, with open beta expected late October and general availability across 35 markets, API access, and credit card billing targeted for Q1 2027.

What "visibility" means when you are on the default tier

Amazon's answer to the Performance Max question (fine, but where did the money go?) is reporting: domain-level visibility by publisher, format, and geography. Read the capability table carefully, though. Publisher lists, custom bids, and audience suppression all sit behind the advanced toggle. In the default tier you can see where every impression served. You cannot decide where the next one serves. Seeing and steering are different tiers, and only one of them is on by default.

The performance claims deserve the same reading. ppc.land counted seven result sets in the DVA+ announcement. Every one is labeled Amazon internal data, most are Brand+ and Performance+ results from 2025, and none is labeled as a DVA+ outcome. The 68% cost-per-acquisition improvement appears twice with two different scopes. The numbers may all hold. They are not yet evidence about the product you would be buying, and Amazon says so in its own footnotes if you scroll far enough.

Ads Agent skills, a lighter MCP, and AMC without SQL

Two Ads Agent skills expand through beta in the coming months in the US: Media Planning, which builds a plan from a brief, and Natural-Language Analytics, which answers performance questions in chat. Amazon cited its own research that 77% of traders feel overwhelmed by campaign complexity and lose more than 10 hours a week to manual management. Both figures feel low to anyone who has run a Q4.

For anyone building on Amazon's API, the Amazon Ads MCP Server gets a Light endpoint: three meta-tools that find and call the right one of the 115-plus underlying tools per task, which Amazon says drops the context an agent must hold from roughly 98,000 tokens to under 5,000. On top of it sits an AMC SQL Generator that turns a plain-language question into a validated AMC query, priced at cost when it reaches general availability in 2027. If AMC has been sitting behind an analyst you do not have, the access barrier keeps getting shorter.

unBoxed 2026: the ad moves into the conversation

Branded Conversations

This is the clearest signal of where Amazon thinks discovery is going. Branded Conversations starts from a Sponsored Brands Collections ad and turns the click into a multi-turn dialogue inside Alexa for Shopping, answered from your catalog, product guides, compatibility details, imagery, and video. An optional conversation brief steers what the assistant emphasizes, and suggested follow-up prompts keep the shopper in your brand's part of the conversation rather than wandering off to compare. It turns on automatically for Sponsored Brands Collections campaigns and you pay only for the first prompt click. General availability is January 2027 in the US.

Amazon's supporting stat is that shoppers who use Sponsored Prompts today convert 48% more often. That is a Sponsored Prompts number, not a Branded Conversations result, and the two products are related the way a hallway is related to a house. Ad Age's buyer panel liked the control over what Alexa for Shopping says about a brand; AdExchanger's question was how much say brands get once the shopper goes off-script. Either way, the operational consequence lands on your content team: the assistant answers from what is in your catalog, so a stale compatibility chart is now a media problem, not a chore for the next quiet Friday. We wrote up the mechanics of conversational placements when Sponsored Prompts arrived.

Review Requests, conversational prompts off Amazon, and Sponsored Services

Review Requests is a new campaign type, in open beta through the end of October in the US for ASINs under 1,000 reviews. It asks verified buyers to leave a review on Amazon's highest-traffic pages and charges only when a shopper clicks through to submit one. Amazon says closed-beta participants tripled weekly reviews. For a launch SKU, that is the most useful thing on this list. Conversational prompts in Responsive eCommerce Creative take the prompt format off Amazon into ads across the open internet, available now in 18 locales. Sponsored Services matches US shoppers with local service providers based on what they just bought. If you sell mattresses, expect a plumber ad next to your order confirmation. Not for most brands.

Insights that skip the SQL

Geographic Insights and Activation, expanding globally, brings Amazon Sales Index penetration data into DVA location targeting, so you can target low-coverage regions for new customers or high-coverage regions for loyalty without an AMC query first. Publisher Insights in AMC, in beta in the US and Canada, adds show, genre, and content-category signals. Amazon Marketing Stream V2 delivers every reporting API metric to your own S3 bucket in Parquet, roughly every 15 minutes instead of hourly, with historical backfill on subscribe. If you have ever tried to react inside a Prime Day window on hourly data, you know why that matters.

Five throughlines across both shows

Two agents, one owner. Seller Assistant runs the store. Ads Agent runs the media. Both are built by Amazon, hold Amazon's memory of your account, and optimize toward objectives Amazon defined. Neither is wrong to use. Both need a standard above them that belongs to you.

The default is AI. Control is a tier. DVA+ default hands targeting and inventory to the models; advanced settings gives the levers back. Seller Assistant workflows default to recommend; acting is one setting away. Full Funnel Campaigns has no segment-level tier at all. Every product has an off-ramp back to control, and every off-ramp is opt-in.

Amazon wants to be where you work and where shoppers decide. The Selling Partner plugin meets you inside Claude. Branded Conversations and Sponsored Ads in Alexa for Shopping meet the shopper inside the assistant. Amazon is placing itself at both ends of the conversation and charging rent in the middle.

The plumbing is opening to partners. Light MCP, Stream V2, the SQL Generator, Publisher Insights. Amazon is making it cheaper to build on its rails, which is good for third-party tools and for the sellers who use them, as long as those tools add judgment rather than another chat window.

Content is now ad input. Branded Conversations answers from your product guides. Seller Assistant plans from your listing and inventory data. The quality of both agents' output is capped by the quality of what you feed them, and nobody at either keynote mentioned that part.

The opportunity: what you can do this quarter that you could not in August

• Claim the free Quick Plus year and assign the two co-worker seats before December 31.
• Run Review Requests on launch and long-tail ASINs under 1,000 reviews while the open beta lasts, and measure review velocity against the four weeks before.
• Give Full Funnel Campaigns a ring-fenced test budget if you have never bought video or streaming. It runs beside your existing campaigns, so nothing that works today has to move.
• Set up Stream V2 if you run any live-event or deal-window strategy. Fifteen-minute data changes what you can react to.
• Put the AMC SQL Generator on the roadmap for early 2027 if AMC has been gated behind an analyst.
• Audit product guides, compatibility data, and imagery before Branded Conversations goes live in January. It will answer with whatever is there, including the typo from 2023.

The risk: what Amazon has not published yet

• Audience transparency in Full Funnel Campaigns and default-tier DVA+. Format-level reporting tells you the channel, not the person.
• DVA+ fees and minimum spend. When Campaign Manager consolidated the DSP in 2025, DSP minimums stayed. The DVA+ announcement is silent on whether they carry over.
• Data terms for multichannel connections. Linking Walmart, Shopify, and TikTok accounts into Seller Central puts your off-Amazon sales and inventory data inside Amazon's systems. Read the terms before you connect, and then read them again.
• What the memory is for. Seller Assistant remembers your pricing patterns and inventory cycles to serve you better. Amazon has not described the boundaries of that memory beyond your own account.
• Quick Plus after the free year. No pricing announced, and any workflow you build on it will need a home in late 2027.
• Stat provenance. The performance numbers in every announcement are Amazon's own, mostly from before the products existed.
• Reporting churn. "Amazon DSP" is going away as a name. Anything in your reporting, your agency contracts, or your Looker dashboards that keys on it needs an update before someone asks why DSP spend went to zero.

What to do this week

1. Claim Quick Plus and assign the seats. Five minutes.
2. Turn on Seller Assistant workflows in recommend-only mode for inventory cover and account health. Leave pricing on recommend until you have watched it for two weeks.
3. Enroll one or two sub-1,000-review ASINs in Review Requests and write down the starting review count.
4. Decide, per campaign, whether you are accepting Amazon's defaults or requesting advanced settings. Write the reason next to each one.
5. Set a Q4 test budget for Full Funnel Campaigns, separate from anything currently hitting target.
6. Write your own operating rules for the whole account: which defaults you accept, which actions need a human before they run, what gets reviewed weekly across Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify, and what "worse" looks like for each. Then run those rules every week, across both of Amazon's agents and every other channel you sell on.

Steps one through five take an afternoon. Step six is the one that breaks in practice.

Step six is the one that breaks: the standard gap

Every seller we talk to has a version of step six. It lives in a spreadsheet, a Notion page, or the head of whoever has run the account longest. It gets applied on good weeks and skipped on busy ones, and it drifts a little every time someone new touches the account. Nobody decides to let it drift. It just does.

Amazon's two agents do not solve that, and were not built to. Seller Assistant remembers your account the way Amazon models it. Ads Agent explains its recommendations after it makes them. Both are good at the thing they do. Neither can hold a standard you wrote, run it the same way every week, and show you the logic before it executes.

That gap is what Qore was built for. Qore is where a rule you currently apply by hand, say "flag any ASIN where the default tier moved more than 20% of budget to streaming while conversion rate fell," becomes a workflow that runs on a schedule across Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, Google, and TikTok, with the change queued for your approval. Describe the standard once. Q helps you shape it into explicit steps you can read like a process document, and Qore runs it. A general assistant remembers your thread. Qore holds your standard. Same inputs, same output, every run, so the answer you get next Tuesday is comparable to the one you got today, not just plausible. If you want the mechanics, we wrote up how an ads SOP becomes an executable workflow.

One boundary, so nobody reads more into this than is there: Qore runs your judgment over Amazon's agents and everything beside them. It does not replace Ads Agent's bid engine on DVA inventory. The point was never to fight Amazon's automation. The point is to own the standard it answers to.

Qore is in open beta. You can sign up at qore.gotrellis.com and have the first workflow running before Full Funnel Campaigns finishes its learning phase.

Conclusion

Accelerate and unBoxed 2026 handed sellers more capability in one week than most years deliver: a free Quick Plus year, a paid review lever, streaming inventory without a DSP seat, faster data, and an assistant that works while you are logged out. Take the ones that fit. The cost is that each one defaults to Amazon's judgment, and the transparency you would need to override it is either a tier you opt into or a feature Amazon has not shipped yet.

Turn on what is free. Test what is new with money you can afford to learn with. And before Q4, write down the standard you want all of it held to, because that is the one thing neither keynote offered, and the only thing in this post Amazon cannot ship for you.