Amazon has reported its third-quarter earnings and its advertising revenues are up 26% year-on-year to US$12 billion (nearly AU$19 billion).
The retail giant’s advertising business has been growing consistently as it diversifies away from its pure-play online retail business.
“We had a strong third quarter as our cost to serve and speed of delivery in our Stores business took another step forward, our AWS growth continued to stabilize, our Advertising revenue grew robustly, and overall operating income and free cash flow rose significantly,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO.
As with most of the large tech platforms, Amazon cited generative AI as crucial to its further business development and innovation.
Over the course of the last year, Amazon has introduced product review highlights, a generative AI–powered feature that lets US shoppers quickly see other customers’ thoughts on a product before reading through reviews.
It has also launched gen AI capabilities to help sellers create product listings. In India, Amazon also announced a generative AI–based digital assistant to help small businesses establish an ecommerce presence. The tool will help sellers with registration, listing and advertising.
It has also launched Alexa speakers with new AI smarts and large language model tools to help devs create more conversational Alexa experiences for their customers. Brands using these new tools include BMW, Character.AI, iRobot, Philips Hue, Splash and Volley.
“The AWS team continues to innovate and deliver at a rapid clip, particularly in generative AI, where the combination of our custom AI chips, Amazon Bedrock being the easiest and most flexible way to build and deploy generative AI applications, and our coding companion (CodeWhisperer) allowing enterprises to have the equivalent of an experienced engineer who understands all of their proprietary code is driving momentum with customers, including adidas, Booking.com, GoDaddy, LexisNexis, Merck, Royal Philips, and United Airlines, all of whom are starting to run generative AI workloads on AWS. Between AWS re:Invent and our 29th holiday shopping season, this is a particularly action-packed time of year at Amazon and we’re excited for what’s to come,” added Jassey.
