Retail Media : sponsored products to autonomous commerce decisioning At CES 2026, the most important story in advertising didn’t play out on a TV screen or a social feed. It unfolded in the retail aisles—physical and digital—where artificial intelligence quietly started running the shelves, the search results, and increasingly, the media plans. Retail media stopped behaving like a bolt‑on performance channel and started to look like core infrastructure for brand building, commerce, and...

At CES 2026, artificial intelligence in advertising finally stopped being a futurist talking point and started behaving like infrastructure. The centre of gravity shifted from shiny demos to something far more consequential: agentic AI systems that can plan, buy, and optimise media with minimal human intervention. The question on everyone’s mind was no longer “what can AI do?” but “what will we still choose to do as humans when the machines can execute the rest?”   How autonomous media agents...

For more than a decade, Amazon's Ads business has been framed as an add-on to retail media tucked neatly around the shopping experience. What Amazon is now building is nothing less than an operating system for premium advertising across screens.