Introduction
Sreenath Reddy (CEO, Intentwise): Welcome to another episode of Intendwise Connect podcast. This is a special episode because this is coming to you live from Amazon Accelerate 2025. I have a special guest with me today, Alan Lewis, the Director of AMC Clean Rooms. We're going to talk a lot about new developments around AMC.
Alan Lewis and His Role at Amazon
Sreenath Reddy: I want to begin with having Alan tell us about his current role at Amazon.
Alan Lewis (Director of AMC Clean Room, Amazon): I've been in Amazon for almost seven years. I joined in early 2019 as the first product manager working on AMC. When we were standing up that team, it was a small, true two-pizza team of, I think, six people at the time. I've been there almost from the start with AMC as we were just getting it off the ground. The team actually started being hired in late 2018, so it's been almost exactly seven years. I'm based in Colorado, which is still the biggest location for the AMC team.
The Big Announcement: AMC is Now Open to Everyone
Sreenath Reddy: There have been some great announcements around AMC. What are you most excited about?
Alan Lewis: The announcement is that AMC is now available to anyone. Anyone who uses sponsored ads , which is a lot of people, can now start using the product without having to do any special setup or talk to somebody. You can get started just by navigating in the Ad Console to Measurement Reporting.
AMC’s Evolution and Adoption
Sreenath Reddy: AMC got rolled out maybe a little over two years ago. Walk me through some of the challenges you've seen around adoption and how that has influenced the roadmap?
Alan Lewis: We've actually had AMC in the hands of customers for almost five years. When we were starting out, we just had a set of APIs, and we only covered Amazon DSP. Over time, we've added signals to cover much more of the breadth of both Amazon ads as well as Amazon stores signals. We've built more features to help make the product more approachable for a wider set of customers. This includes building a UI, a template library, all sorts of no-code tools , and now features that are AI-powered to give you a natural language way to build a custom query. We've continually improved the product based on what our customers have told us. Making it available to anyone without having to go through an account manager has always been a pain point that we wanted to fix.
The Transformative Power of AI
Sreenath Reddy: You mentioned the word AI. Your team has rolled out the SQL generation capability on AI. How has AI influenced what you do?
Alan Lewis: What I've seen with AI in the software industry over the past 12 to 18 months has been transformational. It's the biggest, fastest evolution of how people build software that I've experienced. It feels like the amount of change that might have occurred over a 20-year period has been compressed into two years. For me as a product manager, it's been awesome to do things that used to take a few weeks, but now it's plausible to build something meaningful in a couple of hours.
Sreenath Reddy: Your team has rolled out the SQL generation capability on AI. Talk to me more about just the overall role of AI on your team.
Alan Lewis: We have some features in AMC that are AI-powered to give you a natural language way to build a custom query. I've seen how my team is using tools to improve their workflows. My favorite hack has been using AI for developing prototypes. For example, I was able to use an AI tool (Claude) to generate Python code to enrich my Goodreads reading history data, filling in data gaps like the author's name with 100% accuracy.
The Vision for Data Sets in AMC
Sreenath Reddy: The data sets that have been integrated into AMC are another level. I'm personally most excited about the five-year look back purchase data. What vision is driving your choices around these data sets, and what should we expect over the next couple of years?
Alan Lewis: Our vision for AMC has really been focused more on the accessibility of the product over time. When it comes to the signals we're getting into AMC, that's been much more opportunistic. It’s been driven both by what customers have come to us with and opportunities with other teams we collaborate with within Amazon. We were lucky that we had the opportunity to get the five-year purchase history in, and we were able to turn that around pretty quick.
Addressing the Competitive Intelligence Question
Sreenath Reddy: The two common questions we've gotten are about Amazon Attribution data and competitive intelligence.
Alan Lewis: You're absolutely right about the competitive intelligence. We think about it using the golden rule: What information about your business would you be okay with your competitors having insight into? Our focus is on getting insight about a broader category. Really, you should be focused on your customers. Getting that wider lens of what's out there is the best way for us to think about how you get more customers and grow your business.
The Data Engineering Challenge
Sreenath Reddy: The scale of the engineering problem [for AMC] is sometimes not even understood. Imagine tracking every impression of every shopper on the Amazon properties.
Alan Lewis: We face a lot of engineering challenges given the scale of data sets that we work with. I joke around with the team because the scale of problems we deal with, especially on the data side, are such that we've put some AWS systems to the test.
Busting the AMC Myth
Sreenath Reddy: What is one myth you could burst about AMC here?
Alan Lewis: The myth I have heard is that AMC, because it's a data clean room product, means customers should be focused only on the scenario of bringing in their own signals to match with Amazon's. AMC is unique insofar as that it has a lot of these signals built in from Amazon. It should instead be inspired by: What don't we know about our customers, our customer behavior, and customer dynamics?
Advice for Brands and Agencies
Sreenath Reddy: What advice would you have for brands and agencies that are getting started or wrapping up on AMC adoption?
Alan Lewis: Since it's so easy now, give it a try. Think about what you want to take on yourselves, and what areas might be better served by a partner. You can now enter discussions with a partner much more informed and aware of what's possible.