Amazon Unboxed, unpacked: full funnel, offsite, and AI that actually delivers value
Yes, even Martha Stewart has skin in the AI game. At an Amazon Unboxed keynote in San Francisco in September 2026, the lifestyle icon (and apparently big rap fan) discussed Hint, short for “Home Intelligence,” a product she says has been gestating for decades.
“It’s hard to manage a home!” she told the crowd. Hint is the helper that reminds you to clean your window AC units and cover them before winter, advises you when to clean your gutters, and offers ideas for protecting your home as a major storm rolls in.
No, it’s not a robot butler or a chatbot that writes your grocery list in sonnet sonnet form — just a genuinely useful tool that homeowners can instantly appreciate.
That session echoed one of many key themes throughout Unboxed: consumers are over gimmicky AI and now demand tools where the value is immediately clear. In addition, though, the event focused on the full-funnel commerce media experience – and the clear role of an offsite strategy in accomplishing it.
1. Shopping is becoming a conversation
Amazon says 65% of consumers now use AI chat to research products before they buy, so it has effectively moved the chat inside its store. Over the past year, 350 million consumers have used Amazon’s shopping AI, now branded Alexa for Shopping.
The next step is getting brands into that conversation. “Shopping is a back-and-forth conversation,” said Muthu Muthukrishnan, VP, Sponsored Products & Brands at Amazon Ads.
With Branded Conversations, a brand provides a brief in its own voice explaining which products solve which problems. Prompts attached to Sponsored Products then answer common shopper questions in a click. The intriguing twist is that ads become a research tool on both sides: the prompts help shoppers find the right product and show brands what consumers actually need.
2. Full funnel is the opportunity, and offsite is the gap
Both brands and consumers are realizing that Amazon’s AI can be a powerful research tool within the shopping experience. At the same time, many commerce brands, especially smaller ones, are recognizing they need more than just conversions. Awareness, engagement, and consideration matter more as brands try to scale, build brand affinity, and conquest.
Commerce media data can do much more than drive conversions, but spend hasn’t caught up. According to eMarketer, 80% of commerce and retail media spend still goes onsite, and a Digiday survey found only 15% of marketers think of commerce media as full-funnel.
“If you’re just focusing on the conversion, you’re leaving the rest of the consumer journey on the table,” said Taylor Stewart, VP, Growth and Emerging Channels at TripleLift, on the Amazon Unboxed Connections stage. View the presentation here.
The mid-funnel gets the least attention, which makes it a real chance for competitive advantage. Yet many marketers lack a framework for full-funnel execution offsite, which was why TripleLift introduced the Offsite Impact Framework for orchestrating supply, sell-side data (including behavioral and contextual segments), and creative against KPIs at every stage of the funnel.
3. Creative breaks through, and measurement proves it
You can’t do full funnel without understanding your objectives up and down the funnel. And creative, including the format itself, needs to be tied to those objectives.
Joining TripleLift’s session, Stackline VP of Professional Services Greg Wolny noted that offsite is especially strong for mid- and upper-funnel goals, particularly for products that need more explanation. Brands can put informative messaging in front of relevant consumers and drive them to retailers like Amazon.
“Relevant creative is key, but KPIs for understanding relevance are essential,” he said. “Are we growing share or driving sales?”
Stewart added that creative matters more than ever for breaking through the noise. Great formats now exist for extending social content, and even Amazon influencer content, to CTV, web, and mobile apps.
Third-party impact measurement then shows which creatives drive consumers to take which actions, so each stage of the funnel is optimized against the right goal. Content plus context is where the magic happens.
4. AI – and its operators – are growing up
Amazon used its keynote to launch the Amazon Ads Agent, including Full-Funnel Campaigns: advertisers describe their goals in a natural-language brief, and Amazon suggests a media mix across display, video, and streaming TV. DVA+ brings sponsored CTV, sponsored display, and offsite programmatic into a single chat-driven interface.
The bigger story is maturity, both of the AI and of the people operating it. AI in campaign planning is quickly becoming an expectation rather than a novelty, and some use of AI in creative formats now seems a given. As industry analyst Maribel Lopez put it, last year was about AI exploration, and this year is about putting AI to work. The efficiencies are there, but the innovation isn’t quite yet. The question to ask: “What can we do that we couldn’t do before?”
Speakers agreed our role is shifting from doing to directing. The next hurdle is orchestration. Agents work best together rather than as islands, and complex functions like offsite media optimization demand coordination across data, supply, and creative. Humans still set the strategy and the guardrails. Lopez offered a cautionary example: an AI optimizing for conversions might discover that 20% discounts work wonders, right up until they eat your margins.
Where commerce media goes next
Amazon Unboxed showed how far both AI and commerce media have matured, and made it clear where both need to go next. For AI, that means moving past efficiency to true innovation, with humans directing the orchestra.
For commerce media, it means breaking out of the checkout lane and putting data, supply, and creative to work up and down the funnel. Offsite is where those two paths meet, and the brands that master orchestration there will find their next stage of growth.
