Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sees an opportunity to deliver ads to users during their conversations with the company’s AI-powered digital assistant, Alexa+, he said during Amazon’s second-quarter earnings call Thursday.
“People are excited about the devices that they can buy from us that has Alexa+ enabled in it. People do a lot of shopping [with Alexa+]; it’s a delightful shopping experience that will keep getting better,” said Jassy on the call with investors and Wall Street analysts. “I think over time, there will be opportunities, as people are engaging in more multi-turn conversations, to have advertising play a role to help people find discovery, and also as a lever to drive revenue.”
Amazon says it has rolled out Alexa+ to millions of customers, part of an effort to make its legacy digital assistant capable of agentic behaviors and more natural to talk to. Alexa+ is Amazon’s answer to generative AI voice assistants from OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity that have made legacy systems feel outdated. However, the business models behind generative AI products remain unclear.
Amazon has made Alexa+ free for Prime customers (who pay $14.99 a month) and added a $20-a-month subscription tier for Alexa+ on its own. Jassy suggested on Thursday that Alexa+ could eventually include subscription tiers beyond what’s available today — perhaps an ad-free tier.
Up until now, ads have only appeared in Alexa in limited ways. Users may occasionally see a visual ad on Amazon’s smart display device, the Echo Show, or hear a pre-recorded ad in between songs on one of Alexa’s smart speakers.
But Jassy’s description of an AI-generated ad that Alexa+ delivers in a multistep conversation, which could help users find new products, is uncharted territory for Amazon and the broader tech industry. Marketers have expressed interest in advertising in AI chatbots, and specifically Alexa+, but exactly how remains unclear.
Amazon’s competitors in the AI space seem to think advertising is a promising business model for generative AI, too. Google is exploring how to infuse ads into its AI-powered search experience, AI mode. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he’s open to a “tasteful” form of advertising in ChatGPT.
Amazon is spending a fortune to catch up in the AI race. In the second quarter of 2025, Amazon’s capital expenditures rose to $31.4 billion, up 90% from the same period last year. A large part of that increased spending is to develop Amazon’s in-house AI chips and build out data centers to support AI models. While the revenue of Amazon’s cloud business, AWS, grew 18% in the second quarter, the company likely needs to generate new business to pay for these investments.
