Alexa's new job: holding a conversation with your family until somebody buys something

At the Cannes Lions advertising festival (reported June 23), Amazon announced Alexa+ Agentic Ads, a new ad format where the AI version of Alexa holds a natural back-and-forth conversation about a product and completes the purchase without you ever leaving the ad. It's already in beta on Echo Show screens plus the Amazon app and website, with Papa Johns food ordering and concert tickets from Sony subsidiary The Orchard as the first partners, and Amazon timed the rollout to Prime Day. Because it's a large language model doing the talking instead of an advertiser script, the sales pitch sounds like the assistant just answering your family's questions.