Amazon and YouTube, two of the world’s digital titans, are doubling down on artificial intelligence, rolling out sweeping new tools that promise to reshape how advertising and content creation work for millions across the globe. With both companies announcing major updates just days apart in September 2025, the race to make AI an indispensable creative partner for businesses and creators is clearly heating up.
On September 18, 2025, Amazon announced it had integrated agentic AI tools for video, audio, and image generation from its Creative Studio suite directly into its advertising platform. According to Mumbrella, this move gives Amazon sellers—especially small and medium-sized businesses—the ability to hand over the creative and planning aspects of entire ad campaigns to artificial intelligence. The changes are part of a broader update to Amazon’s Seller Assistant, a generative AI interface introduced last year that already helps sellers with questions and resources.
What’s the big deal? For starters, these new features will be available to all sellers for free and will roll out over the next few months. Amazon’s Seller Assistant can now develop professional-quality ads through simple conversational prompts—a process that used to take weeks can now be done in just hours. The AI doesn’t just spit out ideas; it analyzes a seller’s products alongside Amazon’s shopping signals, generating tailored ad concepts and even explaining its reasoning. Sellers maintain complete control, but get new insights that would be hard to uncover manually.
Amazon’s ambitions go well beyond flashy ad videos. The Seller Assistant can analyze sales patterns, suggest new product categories and variants, develop comprehensive growth plans, and coordinate everything from marketing launches to inventory adjustments. It can even flag slow-moving products before they rack up long-term storage fees, coordinate drop-shipping between fulfillment centers, and flag regulatory or safety concerns about products in different territories. Compliance documentation for tricky electrical products? The AI’s got it covered.
To illustrate the impact, Amazon pointed to Bird Buddy, a company that sells smart bird feeders. Bird Buddy used the AI-powered tool in Creative Studio to design and build a Sponsored Video ad for Father’s Day. The results? A staggering 338% increase in ad click-through rate compared to all other active Sponsored Video ads they were running, 89% new-to-brand offers, and a 121% return on ad spend. Not bad for a tool that’s still in its early days—though, as Mumbrella noted, the generated video wasn’t perfect, with some oddities like an elongated bird foot. Still, the numbers speak volumes.
Amazon’s ad business is already booming, with ad services revenue growing 23% year-on-year in its most recent quarter and annualized revenue between A$90 and $100 billion. The company is betting that agentic AI—AI that doesn’t just respond, but reasons, plans, and acts—will keep that momentum going. "Seller Assistant will get even more capable over time, as we learn more about what sellers want and how we can help them continue to grow and thrive," Amazon said in its announcement, making it clear that the AI’s role in the business ecosystem will only deepen.
Meanwhile, just two days earlier on September 16, YouTube unveiled its own suite of AI tools at the Made on YouTube event in New York. According to CNET, YouTube’s new features are “grounded in our belief that AI should be in service of human creation,” as CEO Neal Mohan put it. The headline act: a custom version of Google DeepMind’s Veo 3 video generation model, now available for Shorts, YouTube’s short-form video platform. This lets users create vertical videos with sound from a simple text prompt—no camera, no editing suite required. The Veo 3 feature is rolling out in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with more countries to follow.
YouTube’s AI push doesn’t stop there. In the coming weeks, users will get access to Edit with AI, which can turn raw footage into a first draft video, and Speech to Song, which turns dialogue from eligible videos into soundtracks. The company is also experimenting with Veo capabilities that can add motion and objects to Shorts, opening up a world of creative possibilities for both amateurs and seasoned creators.
On the backend, YouTube Studio is getting smarter. The platform’s facial likeness detection tool is being expanded, allowing people to catch and request the removal of unauthorized videos made with their facial likeness. This feature is now available as an open beta to all YouTube Partner Program creators, giving users more control over their digital presence. Additional upgrades include an AI-powered conversational chat tool called Ask Studio (for US users), the ability to add collaborators to a video and have it appear to all their audiences, A/B testing for video titles, updates to the Inspiration Tab, and an auto-dubbing with lip sync feature currently in limited testing.
So, what does this all mean for the average business owner, marketer, or content creator? For one, the bar to entry for professional-quality advertising and video production is being lowered dramatically. Small businesses on Amazon can now compete with big brands, leveraging AI to brainstorm, create, and optimize ads that might have previously required a team of specialists. At the same time, YouTube creators can harness AI to speed up video production, experiment with new formats, and protect their likenesses from misuse—without needing advanced technical skills.
Of course, there are caveats. As the Bird Buddy example shows, AI-generated content still has its quirks, and human oversight remains crucial. There are also broader questions about the impact on creative jobs, the authenticity of content, and the potential for misuse—concerns that both Amazon and YouTube say they’re taking seriously as they develop these tools. “We’re developing tools that give creators new ways to tell their stories and viewers ways to discover them,” Neal Mohan of YouTube emphasized, framing AI as an enabler rather than a replacement for human ingenuity.
With both Amazon and YouTube racing to make AI a core part of their platforms, it’s clear that the future of advertising and content creation will look very different from the past. Whether these tools will democratize creativity or simply flood the internet with even more content remains to be seen. But one thing’s for sure: the age of AI-powered creation is no longer just hype—it’s here, and it’s moving fast.
As these updates roll out, businesses and creators alike will need to adapt, experiment, and, perhaps most importantly, keep a close eye on what their new AI partners are cooking up behind the scenes.
