AWS executives and product leaders used the company’s “What’s Next with AWS” event to outline how “agentic” AI is reshaping work, introduce new Amazon Q and Amazon Connect offerings, and announce a multi-year partnership with OpenAI aimed at bringing OpenAI models and agent tooling to AWS customers.
AWS CEO: “Agentic era” is accelerating
Julia White, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of worldwide marketing for AWS, opened the event by saying “it is very clear that we are in the agentic era of AI,” adding that while it is still early, agents are evolving quickly and “will have a profound effect on how we all work.”
AWS CEO Matt Garman said adoption is moving faster than expected and reiterated a prior outlook that the industry is headed toward “a billion agents.” “Across almost every single industry and every customer I talk to, agents are absolutely exploding and changing the way people do business,” he said.
Garman pointed to customer support as an example of shifting constraints, citing AWS DevOps Agent as a tool that can autonomously troubleshoot issues, sometimes proactively identifying problems before customers notice them. He said that can move response times from “15 minutes or 30 minutes” to “minutes to seconds,” freeing technical teams to focus more on architecture and new capabilities.
Job impact: “not that jobs are going away”
Addressing concerns that AI agents will replace jobs, Garman said Amazon is “hiring just as many software developers as we ever had,” and he expects demand to accelerate. He added that the nature of work will change as agents take on repetitive tasks, but he argued that higher-value problem solving will become more important.
White cited U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicating tech jobs are adding more than 300,000 roles and growing at twice the rate of other fields. She also said Amazon is “on track to hire over 11,000” software development engineer interns and early-career employees, a figure Garman echoed: “Amazon is hiring 11,000 new SDE interns and full-time employees this year.”
Garman also described internal changes, including an agentic-first transformation of Amazon’s intranet for more than 1 million employees, and said agentic development tools have shortened software iteration cycles. He gave an example of a bug reported through a social channel that a team “fixed it, and got it out inside of 20 minutes.”
New Amazon Q desktop preview and productivity features
White announced that a new Amazon Q desktop experience would be available in preview “today.” Garman called it a “complete game changer,” describing it as combining enterprise data sources with local desktop capabilities while emphasizing security. He said the product aims to put AI into the hands of all employees so they can “build small agents to help them with everything that they’re doing in their daily lives.”
Jigar Thakkar, Vice President of Amazon Q, said Amazon Q is designed to reduce time spent on “searching, summarizing, the context switching.” He highlighted new capabilities that bring together local files, calendars, email, and other applications, and introduced “intelligent documents” that connect with live data and can update automatically into interactive dashboards.
Thakkar said Q’s “Knowledge Graph” connects to systems such as email, Slack, CRM, calendars, and local documents to build “a living map of your work.” In demonstrations, he described Q scheduling meetings with a single prompt, preparing customer briefings by pulling information from multiple internal systems and files, and generating artifacts such as presentations, documents, emails, and spreadsheets. He also outlined a new capability for teams to create dedicated collaboration spaces that unify processes spread across siloed tools.
On security and controls, Thakkar said Q reflects “20 years of heritage of AWS” across “compliance, security and privacy.” He also shared customer feedback from companies including BMW, 3M, Mondelēz, Allianz and others, saying some reported cutting production time for processes by “almost 80%,” and in some examples reducing time to process customer issues by “more than 50%.”
Amazon Connect expands into a “family of products”
Colleen Aubrey, Senior Vice President of AWS Applied AI Solutions, said AWS is applying Amazon’s internal operating experience to customer-facing applications, particularly in areas where Amazon historically built its own tools after outgrowing off-the-shelf software.
White said Amazon Connect surpassed $1 billion in revenue last year. Aubrey described Connect as being reworked into a next-generation, AI-enabled experience across the customer journey, citing metrics including “20 million interactions a day” and “12 billion of AI minutes in conversations last year.”
Aubrey announced that Amazon Connect will become a broader product family, with three new “agentic solutions”:
- Amazon Connect Decisions
- Amazon Connect Talent
- Amazon Connect Health
The existing product will be renamed Amazon Connect Customer. Aubrey framed the strategy as creating “agentic teammates” designed to be intuitive, trustworthy, and continuously learning, with a focus on minimizing change management. She also described a design philosophy she called “humorphism,” centered on mirroring the dynamics of human interaction.
In a demo, Olivia Igbokwe-Curry, Director of Federal Affairs at AWS, showed Amazon Connect Decisions supporting demand and supply planning, including building demand plans for a new product launch by finding comparable products and incorporating sales forecasts. Aubrey said the product incorporates Amazon’s experience managing demand across “400 million SKUs.” The demo also showed Decisions prioritizing a small set of exceptions instead of “thousands of alerts,” surfacing root causes, and presenting options with trade-offs.
Amazon Connect Talent focused on high-volume hiring. Aubrey said Amazon hires “about 250,000 people in the U.S.” for peak periods and built internal systems to improve candidate experience, reduce cycle time, and increase recruiter capacity. In the demo, Igbokwe-Curry showed Talent translating a job description into competencies, interview questions, and an assessment rubric, and enabling candidates to interview on their own timeline. The system anonymizes candidates and provides standardized scoring and transcript-based traceability, while leaving the final hiring decision to the recruiter.
Amazon Connect Health was positioned as an end-to-end patient and provider workflow product, informed by Amazon Pharmacy and One Medical, along with learnings from AWS healthcare customers. Aubrey said the goal is to reduce administrative burden so clinicians can spend more time with patients, and emphasized traceability for insights and recommendations back to source data and clinical standards.
OpenAI partnership brings models and agents to AWS
White said AWS has entered a “big multi-year partnership” with OpenAI spanning models, infrastructure, and solutions. In a recorded message, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said OpenAI and AWS are “co-developing an agent platform from the ground up,” integrated with AWS services and powered by OpenAI models. He said OpenAI plans to bring Codex to customers on AWS, and highlighted AWS Trainium capacity as part of the infrastructure collaboration.
Garman called the partnership a milestone for customers seeking “the broadest set of choices” and access to “the absolute best frontier models.” OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser said she is hearing enterprise customers want to move beyond pilots to “full enterprise wide,” emphasizing the need for models in a “trusted environment.” She said bringing “the power of GPT-5.5, our APIs, Codex, all on Amazon Bedrock” would help customers focus on outcomes and building agents.
During the on-stage discussion, AWS leaders said OpenAI’s models will run on Amazon Bedrock, with limited preview availability “today” and general availability expected “in weeks.” An AWS infrastructure leader said “5.4” would be available in limited preview inside Bedrock starting today, followed by “5.5 and all of the frontier models from OpenAI going forward” within the next couple of weeks.
AWS also announced a preview of Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI, described as a managed environment to configure an agent’s skills, memory policies, and tool access, run the agent within AWS compute environments, and interact via an inference API. The speakers emphasized integration with AWS governance controls such as IAM policies and CloudTrail.
Separately, Dresser said Codex is growing quickly, citing an increase from “3 million weekly active users to 4 million in 2 weeks,” and characterized it as “agentic” software development life cycle tooling that goes “beyond just coding.”
About Amazon.com NASDAQ: AMZN
Amazon.com, Inc is a diversified technology and retail company best known for its e-commerce marketplace and broad portfolio of consumer and enterprise services. Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and headquartered in Seattle, Washington, the company launched as an online bookseller and expanded into a global retail platform that sells products directly to consumers and provides a marketplace for third-party sellers. Over time Amazon has grown beyond retail into areas including cloud computing, digital media, devices and logistics.
Key businesses and offerings include Amazon's online marketplace and fulfillment services, the Amazon Prime membership program (which bundles expedited shipping with streaming and other benefits), Amazon Web Services (AWS) which supplies on-demand cloud computing and storage to businesses and public-sector customers, and a range of content and advertising services such as Prime Video and Amazon Advertising.
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