A year ago, Gigi launched to help advertisers buy Amazon streaming ads. Now, the startup appears to be embracing a fairly obvious next phase: agentic AI.
Today, Gigi’s cofounder and CEO, Adam Epstein, unveiled the launch of what is essentially an AI, ChatGPT-like media manager for Amazon DSP—designed to make campaign management easier and more scalable for agencies.
Gigi is “your agency’s next media manager for the Amazon DSP,” says Epstein, noting that it “has been trained on our team’s collective experience of over 20 years in Amazon Ads.”
This also seems like the start of a broader agentic solutions push for Gigi. Epstein shared more details:
“Over the past year, we’ve been working with media managers at retail media agencies to understand how they spend their time. We then deconstructed all the tasks that consume the most time and are the least strategic, and created a set of agentic workflows and automations so media managers can focus on developing expertise in the service of their clients.”
While the initial solution focuses on media management, Gigi has also offered tools related to first-party data and Amazon Marketing Cloud—so we may see more agentic solutions for other parts of Amazon’s ad/adtech ecosystem.
Why This Matters:
This matters for two reasons.
First, Amazon’s ad-supported video is exploding. According to Amazon last month, Prime Video’s ad-supported monthly audience has reached more than 130 million in the U.S., with engagement increasing to 37% in monthly viewing hours. Amazon has also fundamentally changed CTV ad-buying, essentially bringing down CPMs single-handedly to make CTV ad-buying an option for brands of all sizes. As demand for Amazon’s inventory grows, Gigi’s agentic tool can help agencies manage that demand more effectively.
Second, it underscores the continued push in adtech for agentic AI. Agentic AI is the “easy button” for advertisers—and everyone wants an easy button. Building agentic tools meets that need perfectly. Gigi clearly sees this and is adjusting its strategy accordingly. (Note that the new offering is available via closed beta.)
Experts React:
Mike Ryan, Head of Ecommerce Insights at Smarter Ecommerce, shared a great take on the launch, emphasizing how important it is for third-party adtech companies to “own” agentic workflows and solutions.
Epstein also had a good exchange on X about how Gigi works with Amazon DSP.
Our Take:
Gigi’s news is well-timed, landing just after Meta’s big announcement about AI-powered creative automation. Creative seems like the easier part of advertising to automate with AI (given very rapid advancements), but actual campaign creation, management, and optimization through agentic tools feels even more important. More startups jumping in to offer these tools just makes sense.
One last thing: candidly, building an agentic AI solution is also a smart play when raising funds—agentic seems to be a key focus for investors and VCs right now. We’re sure Gigi knows that. (And you can’t blame them!)
