Amazon Release Notes

LAUNCH ANNOUNCEMENT

Omnichannel Metrics now delivers retailer-level breakouts

What launched?

Omnichannel Metrics (OCM) now provides insights into how Amazon DSP campaigns drive sales across specific retailers for US advertisers. Building on the product category-level breakouts earlier this year, this update surfaces retailer-level units and sales at both the study and campaign level, so advertisers can see exactly where beyond-Amazon purchases occur.

Why is it important?

For the first time, advertisers can see which specific retailers their Amazon DSP campaigns drive sales at. OCM leverages a combination of first-party Amazon Shopper Panel and third-party signals to measure impact beyond the Amazon store. Retailer breakouts are grounded in exposure-based attribution, reflecting where ad-exposed shoppers actually purchased and giving advertisers the retailer-level specificity needed to optimize omnichannel strategies.

Where is the feature available?

• North America: United States

Who can use it?

• Amazon DSP Self-Service
• Amazon DSP Managed Service

Where do I access it?

• Amazon DSP

Back to announcements

We're excited to share that starting July 7, 2026, the maximum list price for the 70% royalty option price band changes from $9.99 to $12.99 on Amazon.com, with equivalent changes across all KDP marketplaces.

What this means for you:

• You can now price your eBook between $2.99 and $12.99 and remain eligible for the 70% royalty option
• If you're on the 35% royalty option and priced within the new range, you may be eligible to switch to the 70% royalty option
• No action is required — There's no requirement to change your list price or royalty option

What's not changing:

• Delivery costs still apply as before
• The 35% royalty option is unchanged
• Audiobook with virtual voice minimum and maximum list prices is unaffected
• Translated editions linked to your original eBook inherit your updates automatically

To update your list price, visit How to update your book’s price. For full details on the expanded price band, visit the eBook List Price Requirements.

LAUNCH ANNOUNCEMENT

Amazon DSP expands omnichannel capabilities with new open internet podcast and streaming audio inventory at scale

What launched?

For the first time, self-service advertisers using Amazon DSP can access programmatic podcast ads across premium publishers and SSPs including Spotify Ad Exchange, SiriusXM Media/AdsWizz, and iHeart Media/Triton. With flexible transaction methods across PMP and Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) deals for both podcasts and streaming audio, advertisers can tailor buying to their preferred deal structure and execute Inventory Groups across both formats for unified campaign management. With this global launch, advertisers can plan, activate, and measure podcasts and streaming audio ads at scale alongside display, video, and streaming TV, all within a single omnichannel advertising platform.

Why is it important?

Consumers spend more than 1 hour and 25 minutes per day listening to ad-supported audio, with podcasts and streaming audio representing nearly 40% of that time (Edison Share of Ear, Q2 2026). Amazon DSP now offers full buying flexibility with PMP and Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) enabled across both podcasts and streaming audio, paired with the same measurement capabilities advertisers expect from Amazon Ads across their digital campaigns. By consolidating audio buying into a single solution, advertisers no longer need separate solutions and workflows, reaching engaged listeners more efficiently with consistent campaign management across all formats.

Where is the feature available?

• North America: United States, Canada, Mexico
• South America: Brazil
• Europe: Germany, Spain, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Poland, Turkey, Austria, Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Denmark, Luxembourg
• Middle East: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain, Kuwait
• Asia Pacific: Australia, India, Japan, China, New Zealand, Singapore

Who can use it?

• Self-service advertisers

Where do I access it?

• Amazon DSP

We’re now in Preview for Glue Data Catalog (S3 data) & Databricks Unity Catalog Integration!

For all customers with Glue Data Catalog with S3 data using Athena (or Databricks Unity Catalog), the Agentic Catalog Experience can be used. To try this, customers can go to Create Data Source (on the structured data side), select Glue Data Catalog (or Databricks) and hit ‘Explore data’

What our customers get:

• Agentic Catalog Experience for GDC and UC — Discover & create catalog representations (Quick Datasets/Topics) using natural language/inherit semantics and relationships. 3 benefits of taking this catalog approach over a direct MCP connection:

  1. Data teams can create curated context boundaries for their structured data - grounded Q&A (more accurate answers)
  2. Deterministic dashboards and all other Quick use cases (Q&A and others)
  3. Unified context in Quick - by having catalog representations (as Datasets and Topics) in Quick, we form the complete context (structured data + Slack + Outlook and other sources) to the end users

YouTube video captures these benefits

Resources:

• YouTube: Preview announcement video
• LinkedIn announcement
• Full documentation

Go ahead and try the feature out, today! If there are any questions, let us know by responding to this thread.

• Amazon Quick Team.

Headlines

It has been a busy stretch on the AWS Summit circuit. At the New York City Summit, I delivered a workshop called Building AI architectures with AWS Serverless, and it was a lot of fun watching builders wire up agents and serverless services to solve real problems in a single afternoon. This week I am heading down to the Washington, DC Summit, which always puts a spotlight on innovation in the public sector. If you are going to be there, come say hello.

A question I hear a lot at these events is how teams can put AI to work without waiting on a long engineering backlog, and this week’s biggest launch speaks directly to that, with Amazon Connect Customer introducing a no-code way for business teams to design AI powered customer experiences themselves. Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news.

Amazon Connect Customer launched the Agentic CX designer (NLX) in preview, a no-code canvas for designing and deploying AI powered self service experiences. Business teams can build and launch voice and digital experiences that bring agentic and deterministic AI together in one governed flow, going from design to testing and simulation to production ready experiences in weeks rather than months. The launch also includes Live Sync in preview, a patented technology that drives a customer’s web or mobile experience in real time as they speak or type. A caller can complete a form or pull up the right product page without ever leaving the conversation. To see how this reshapes who designs customer experience, read the blog post on how the business user is the new architect of customer experience.

Last week’s launches

Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• AWS Lambda MicroVMs – A new serverless compute primitive that gives each user or job VM level isolation with near instant launch and resume speeds, plus the ability to suspend and resume execution for up to 8 hours. Built on Firecracker, it is made for running user or AI generated code in multi-tenant applications without managing virtualization infrastructure or trading off isolation, speed, and state.
• Amazon EC2 AMI Watermarks – Lets you embed custom identifiers in your private AMIs that automatically carry forward to every derived AMI across copies, Regions, and account shares. You can combine watermarks with Allowed AMIs and Declarative Policies to restrict launches to approved images, available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions.
• AWS Outposts self-service lifecycle management – Adds self service configuration, quoting, ordering, subscription management, renewal, and decommissioning directly from the console, CLI, and API. A new quoting tool generates real time cost estimates in seconds and surfaces account and regional constraints before you submit an order.
• Amazon MSK AI Agent Skills – Gives AI coding assistants like Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor expert, up-to-date guidance for operating Amazon MSK, covering troubleshooting, sizing, configuring, monitoring, and migrating external Kafka clusters to MSK Express. Tasks that once required specialized knowledge become a guided experience developers can complete on their own.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service AI-assisted migrations – Migration Assistant now includes an agent guided experience that helps you move self managed Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, or OpenSearch deployments to OpenSearch Serverless or Managed Clusters using tools like Kiro and Claude Code, with new live traffic capture and replay support for Solr.
• Amazon GuardDuty AI-powered investigations (preview) – Automatically analyzes findings and accounts to help you separate true threats from benign activity, examining context and related activity from the last 90 days with knowledge graphs and threat intelligence. Each investigation returns a disposition assessment with confidence scoring, MITRE ATT&CK classification, and actionable recommendations in minutes.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news

Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

• Open Governance for MySQL – Oracle announced a community governance model for MySQL that gives organizations outside Oracle a defined role in the project, including four non Oracle seats on a new Steering Committee and a public GitHub presence. AWS holds a seat and shares why it supports the move and how it already contributes fixes upstream for everyone running MySQL.
• A new way to keep your AWS Certification current -You can now maintain an eligible AWS Certification for an additional year by completing curated training and hands on labs on AWS Skill Builder instead of retaking a full exam. The option is available today in open beta for several Associate and Professional certifications, with more coming later this year.
• The All Builders Welcome Grant insider’s guide for 2026 applicants – A community guide on AWS Builder Center that walks early career builders through applying for the grant, which covers a full conference pass, airfare, and hotel for AWS re:Invent 2026. Applications are open now and close on July 14.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Looking for ways to connect with builders in person? Check out the AWS Summits coming to a city near you, find a local AWS Community Day led by user groups around the world, and explore tutorials, community content, and ways to grow your skills over at the AWS Builder Center.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

-Micah

Today, AWS announces multiple new features for Amazon Quick, including autonomous agents, multi-dataset analytics capabilities, and a redesigned activity feed. Amazon Quick is the AI assistant that connects to popular business applications and learns user workflows. These new capabilities enable Quick to handle recurring tasks continuously while providing unified analytics across multiple data sources.

With autonomous agents, users can describe tasks in natural language and set granular autonomy levels—from step-by-step approval to broad goal-based execution. Agents operate continuously to automate workflows like following up on stalled deals, summarizing regulatory changes, and processing purchase orders, eliminating manual repetitive work and notification overload. The new multi-dataset analytics feature enables users to query across data sources including Snowflake and relational databases using natural language, without requiring technical data preparation or pre-joining datasets. Quick inherits semantic intelligence from existing data catalogs such as AWS Glue, Databricks Unity Catalog, and Collibra, while enforcing security through identity propagation that respects existing permissions.

The redesigned activity feed provides a personalized, conversational interface where users can prioritize updates using thumbs up/down feedback, reply to emails and Slack messages, and approve requests directly—all without switching between applications. Users can also share Quick applications as public websites, extending collaboration capabilities beyond their organization.

To learn more about these new Amazon Quick capabilities, including autonomous agents, multi-dataset analytics., and redesigned activity feed, read the launch blog. You can create an account for free and get started in minutes at aws.com/quick.

LAUNCH ANNOUNCEMENT

Self Service Sponsored Tiles ads now available on Alexa+ conversational entertainment content discovery

Amazon is extending Alexa conversational entertainment ads for self service advertisers buying Sponsored Tiles on FireTV and Prime Video. Conversational Entertainment Ads, are a new display advertising format on eligible Echo Show devices that seamlessly integrates sponsored Media and Entertainment (M&E) content into entertainment-related voice queries with Alexa+, our next-generation conversational AI assistant. Customers can engage with the ads through voice and touch to subscribe to Prime Video Channels or buy/rent titles directly on their Echo Show devices. With this launch, Alexa will be available as a self service inventory source alongside FTV and Prime Video for all new self service Sponsored Tile ads.

Conversational Sponsored Tiles Ads

Following the exciting announcement about Alexa+, our next-generation conversational AI assistant, conversational entertainment ads present a seamless expansion opportunity for Prime Video Channels and Transactional Video On Demand advertisers' self service Sponsored Tile campaigns, from FireTV and Prime Video to now include Alexa devices, requiring no additional setup or creative development. This expansion connects advertisers with millions of Echo Show users during highly relevant entertainment discovery moments through both touch and voice interactions, creating incremental subscription opportunities when customers actively seek content; helping maximize advertisers' customer acquisition efforts through a single unified solution.

Where is the feature available?

• North America: United States

Who can use it?

• Self service

Where do I access it?

• Amazon DSP

Back to announcements

Starting in August 2026, our banking partner will no longer support check payments in EUR currency, this includes payments from Amazon.fr, Amazon.es, Amazon.it, Amazon.nl, Amazon.de, Amazon.ie, and Amazon.be. If you receive your payment via check in EUR currency, we strongly encourage you to switch to an Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) payment method. If EFT is not yet available in your country, or if you do not update your payment method by July 13, 2026, your August payment will default to a USD check at an exchange rate determined by Amazon, based on rates received from an exchange rate service. This converted amount will be inclusive of all fees associated with the conversion.

To switch to an electronic payment method, visit Add or update a bank account.

What happens if you don't update your payment method

If you do not add a bank account by July 13, 2026, your EUR royalties will be converted to USD and issued as a USD check. Please note:

• The conversion is calculated at an exchange rate determined by Amazon, based on rates received from an exchange rate service. This converted amount will be inclusive of all fees associated with the conversion and will constitute full payment and settlement. This applies regardless of your physical location.
• The minimum payment threshold of $100 USD applies to the USD amount due to you —if the balance is below $100, payment will accrue until it exceeds $100.
• Your Prior Month's Royalties Report will continue to display payments in the original currency (e.g., EUR), while your Payments dashboard will reflect the USD converted amount.

Why switch to an electronic payment method

• Faster delivery — no waiting for checks in the mail
• Lower minimum payment thresholds
• Where EFT is available in the Sale Currency, payments are made in that currency directly with no conversion

For more information about KDP payments, visit KDP Payment Options.

Amazon Quick now integrates with Snowflake Cortex AI through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling teams to query their Snowflake data and documents using natural language, and automate multi-step workflows directly within their Quick workspace. After setting up the connection using Snowflake’s managed MCP server with OAuth authentication, you can ask questions across structured data through Cortex Analyst and retrieve insights from unstructured documents through Cortex Search.

With this integration, you can build Flows in Quick that orchestrate Snowflake Cortex Agents to execute repeatable, governed workflows with consistent structured output. This is ideal for any multi-step process that spans structured data and unstructured documents. The same MCP connection is also accessible from Quick Chat and other Quick features. For example, users can ask ad-hoc follow-up questions or explore their Snowflake data conversationally alongside their automated flows. Quick intelligently routes relevant prompts to Snowflake Cortex AI and returns contextualized answers alongside enterprise knowledge stored in Quick Spaces, giving teams both the rigor of a structured process and the flexibility of a conversational interface.

The Snowflake Cortex AI integration with Amazon Quick is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Quick is available.

Visit the Amazon Quick website to learn more and start your Quick free trial. To learn more about the Snowflake Cortex AI integration, read the blog. To learn more about Quick integrations, visit the integrations page.

We’re excited to share that Kindle Translate now supports translation between English and Portuguese (Brazil), and between English and Italian!

Beta authors can now create publication-ready translations for these languages, in addition to existing language options.

Kindle Translate eBooks have an average customer rating of over 4 stars and we're continuing to improve our service. We expect to release more languages throughout the year, so stay tuned for updates.

To learn more about Kindle Translate, visit Getting Started with Kindle Translate.

*Kindle Translate is an invite-only beta for eligible KDP eBooks We plan to grow the beta over time. If you’re interested in participating in the Kindle Translate beta, join our interest list. To receive beta updates from KDP, make sure you’re subscribed to KDP’s news and product announcement emails.

LAUNCH ANNOUNCEMENT

Streamline campaign analysis with unified reporting, now generally available

What launched?

Unified reporting is now generally available in Ads Console, consolidating reporting across Amazon Ads into a single interface. Instead of combining separate reports, you can now create one report that includes campaigns across multiple manager or advertiser accounts, ad products, countries, metrics, and dimensions. Access the new page in the left navigation (Measurement and Reporting > Reporting), where you can build and schedule a custom report or use a pre-built template as shown below.

The reporting landing page

How to create a report using report builder

Why is it important?

Unified reporting reduces report generation time from hours to minutes, with standardized metrics and dimensions across ad products for consistent measurement. You can analyze results by multi-dimensional combinations such as campaign, placement, and audience for deeper insights across your campaigns. Access up to 15 months of daily or weekly data and up to 6 years of monthly, yearly, or summary-grain data for year-over-year analysis or seasonal reporting.

Where is the feature available?

• North America: United States, Canada, Mexico
• South America: Brazil
• Europe: Germany, Spain, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Poland, Turkey, Austria, Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Denmark, Luxembourg
• Middle East: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain, Kuwait
• Asia Pacific: Australia, India, Japan, China, New Zealand, Singapore

What's New since Beta

Based on beta feedback, this GA release includes key improvements: a template gallery to reduce time to create report for new advertisers, streamlined single-account workflows to simplify the experience for advertisers managing one account, standardized metrics, dimensions and attribution methodology (from conversion to traffic based attribution) to ensure consistent measurement across ad products, and managed service support to extend unified reporting to advertisers working with Amazon managed services.

The template gallery within reporting page on Ads Console

Who can use it?

• All advertisers worldwide who access Amazon Ads reporting via the Ads Console can access unified reporting.

Where do I access it?

• Amazon Ads Console (UI)
• Amazon Marketing Stream (beta)
• Reporting API (beta)

What’s next?

• As part of this launch, we're sunsetting Sponsored Ads reports (Measurement and reporting > Sponsored Ads reports) and Amazon DSP reports (Measurement and reporting > Amazon DSP reports) by December 31, 2026. To learn more, see this Help Center article.
• To get started creating or recreating your reports in unified reporting, see this link. An automated subscription migration tool will be available soon to help you transition your existing scheduled reports.

Amazon SageMaker Studio quick setup now completes in under twenty seconds, reduced from over two minutes. Whether you are building ML pipelines, exploring data, developing with notebooks, or fine-tuning foundation models, you can go from sign-in to a fully configured Studio environment almost instantly.

As part of this streamlined setup, newly created Studio environments now come with serverless model customization permissions automatically configured. A new managed policy, AmazonSageMakerModelCustomizationCoreAccess, is created and attached for you, providing permissions for serverless model customization jobs including fine-tuning with custom reward functions for reinforcement learning, model evaluation, and deployment to SageMaker or Bedrock endpoints. This eliminates the need to manually create and configure IAM roles and policies before you can start experimenting. For existing Studio environments, actionable messages with direct links to documentation guide you through adding these permissions.

This feature is available in all AWS Commercial Regions where Amazon SageMaker Studio is supported. To get started, create a new Studio environment using quick setup in the SageMaker AI Console. To learn more, see Quick setup and Model Customization permissions setup in the Amazon SageMaker documentation.

You can export cases from the agent workspace to CSV files. Search for cases, select one or more, and choose Export. Use the exported CSV file with spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.

When you export cases, you can choose which columns to include, such as status, title, and custom fields. The columns you select determine which case data appears in the file.

You can use the exported CSV file to do the following:

• Generate reports from case data
• Share case data with stakeholders outside the agent workspace
• Analyze case data offline in a spreadsheet application

To use this feature, you must have the Cases - Export permission in your security profile. For more information, see Export cases to CSV.

Connect Customer now enables managers to use generative AI to automatically evaluate the quality of self-service (AI agent) interactions, using the same evaluation framework already available for human agents. As AI agents handle a growing volume of customer contacts, this gives you a scalable way to monitor quality and identify where your AI agents need improvement without manual review of every transcript.

You define evaluation criteria in natural language within evaluation forms, such as “Were all of the customer’s issues resolved by the AI agent?” Connect Customer applies that criteria across self-service interactions automatically, providing detailed reasoning and relevant reference points from the conversation transcript for each score. Managers can review results in aggregate to identify systemic issues, or drill into individual contacts alongside interaction recordings and transcripts.

For more information, see generative AI performance evaluations.

Available in all AWS Regions where Connect Customer performance evaluations are available.

Agents and supervisors now receive automatic notifications when schedules change, rather than having to repeatedly check for updates themselves. You can define rules to send email or text notifications when new schedules are published, when existing schedules are updated, or when an agent’s leave request status changes. This eliminates manual notification effort for schedulers and ensures agents know immediately when something that affects their day has changed.

Available in all AWS Regions where Connect Customer agent scheduling is available.