Agentic AI Takes Centre Stage: Highlights From AWS Summit New York

AWS has been sharing a steady stream of announcements this summer, including those from its AWS Analyst Forum and AWS Summit New York City. In short, AWS is making the case for why businesses should prioritize investing in AI now. While we know that many organizations are expecting to use AI, the most important factors they need to spur investment – according to our Verdantix AI global corporate survey – are the ability to demonstrate successful AI pilot projects (87%) and more internal expertise (85%). At the summit, AWS highlighted the combination of resources firms can use to move forward, centring on its expanding portfolio of tools that increasingly encapsulate best practices with more enterprise-level functionality (check out the news on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Amazon Nova), as well as a greater network of partners, partner assets and channels.

Moving beyond theory with agentic AI
As expected, agentic AI was front and centre at the summit. In the analyst portion of the event, Erin Kraemer, Senior Principal Technical Product Manager for AWS Agentic AI, focused primarily on accelerating agentic AI innovation and the resulting opportunities for business transformation. Her examples included ones you’ve probably heard before: AI agents autonomously working individually or together, potentially taking on the role of another team member who can conduct otherwise unwanted or underfunded tasks, such as tackling technical debt and projects that are always on the back burner.

Erin’s key point – and one that was apparent in many of the big stage presentations – was that AWS is enabling innovation but also laying the foundations and implementing guardrails. Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s SVP and Head Scientist for AGI, also talked about the fact that AWS wants to overcome the belief that ‘getting agents to production is still too hard’. He emphasized that AWS is seeking to give people permission (and the capabilities) to play and learn, build proof points, and move beyond theory. We’re at an important turning point in AI adoption and AWS, like other competitors in this market, recognizes that businesses need to focus on AI outcomes that include high quality and high performance. At this stage, organizations also want the ability to create new AI-powered products and services, as seen in Intuit's agentic AI experiences.

The value of the AI ecosystem
Partners and partnerships are an important component in changing AI into just one more tool in businesses’ toolkit. The summit also featured services providers including Accenture, Deloitte and Tata Consultancy Services, with demos of how they build on AWS’s capabilities to speed adoption and business value. And the trend of increasing need for collaboration in the AI ecosystem will only grow; AWS followed up the summit with news that OpenAI open weight models are available directly through Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker AI.

Connecting AI and sustainability
From a sustainability perspective, AWS representatives on the big stage at the summit only spoke briefly about driving efficiency in the use of AI. Other sustainability-related examples were fairly minimal – but worth noting. An Amazon Nova Act demo showed how the tool could help improve customer experience on non-profit and government websites that unfortunately are often so complex they act as a deterrent to serving the individuals they intend to reach (think access to food benefits for low-income families). Meanwhile, some news that wasn’t featured at the summit: AWS’s additional commitment to the availability of environmental data in collaboration with NOAA, which goes back to 2015.

For more insights on AI, check out the research connecting AI and sustainability, as well as our report on market trends for LLMs and AI cloud services.