As startups and brands across the Gulf look to scale amid tighter competition and rising customer acquisition costs, Amazon Ads is positioning artificial intelligence not as a shortcut to sales, but as a strategic lever for smarter, faster growth.
Rayan Karaky, Managing Director for EMEA and Southeast Asia Expansion at Amazon Ads, says the most successful companies in the region are using AI to move beyond campaign-level optimization and into real-time decision-making across their businesses. Rather than relying on quarterly reviews, these brands are testing hypotheses faster, identifying customer behavior patterns earlier, and continuously refining their marketing mix.
Amazon Ads, he explains, has embedded advanced AI across the entire advertising journey — from generating insights and reaching the right audiences to building scalable creatives and automatically optimizing performance. Generative AI plays a central role, with free, self-service tools designed to lower the barrier for startups and small businesses to adopt sophisticated advertising capabilities.
One example is Image Generator, Amazon Ads’ first major generative AI product, which creates ad-ready lifestyle images. Another is Brand+, an AI-driven capability that simplifies brand awareness campaigns while directly linking them to sales outcomes. Brand+ uses AI to identify audience segments most likely to convert within a 90-day window, allowing advertisers to make brand-building more precise and measurable.
The impact, Karaky says, extends well beyond advertising metrics. When small and medium-sized businesses use AI-powered insights to inform product roadmaps, inventory planning, and market expansion strategies, they create sustainable competitive advantages rooted in customer intelligence. “They’re scaling their understanding of what customers actually want and how to deliver it profitably,” he says.
This shift toward AI-led decision-making is already reshaping how founders and investors view growth in the region. Businesses are increasingly bullish on AI’s role in advertising, with Amazon Ads research showing that 94% of UAE SMB marketing leaders believe AI tools will drive future growth by freeing up time for higher-value strategic priorities.
As companies look beyond regional success toward global expansion, Karaky argues that scale should be treated as a maturity journey, not just a geographic one. To support that transition, Amazon Ads has introduced the Amazon Business Maturity Framework, which guides brands through four stages — from establishing basic digital foundations to leveraging predictive analytics and emerging technologies.
For GCC startups, the framework offers a disciplined approach to growth, helping them invest in the right capabilities at the right time. The businesses that ultimately succeed globally, Karaky says, are those that deeply understand their customers at home first — and then use that intelligence to inform expansion, rather than abandoning it in pursuit of scale.
