Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick, Dion Hinchcliffe
Publication Date: March 6, 2025
According to an internal email reviewed by Reuters, Amazon has reportedly formed a new group focused on Agentic AI, to be led by AWS executive Swami Sivasubramanian. The email included a statement from AWS CEO Matt Garman indicating Agentic AI has the potential to be the company’s next multi-billion dollar business. While the company has yet to comment on the news, the creation of a group focused on agentic AI portends the development and commercialization of technology that could be positioned to compete against similar technology from Salesforce, Microsoft, and other large enterprise technology vendors.
What is Covered in this Article:
- AWS Forms Agentic AI Group – According to an email reviewed by Reuters, AWS has reportedly created a new group dedicated to agentic AI, with CEO Matt Garman positioning it as a major business opportunity, though no enterprise-specific AI agents have been announced yet.
- Competitive Market Entry – Despite the growing prominence of agentic AI, AWS has been relatively late in formally structuring a dedicated group, while competitors such as Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, and Oracle have already made significant moves in this space.
- Potential Strategic Approach – AWS may differentiate itself by leveraging its cloud and data platform strengths, potentially offering a vendor-agnostic AI orchestration system that enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage AI agents across various environments.
- Future Developments to Watch – AWS likely will clarify its agentic AI strategy in the coming months, including potential partner announcements and a go-to-market framework, while competitors will likely emphasize their head start in the field.
The News: AWS has reportedly created a new group focused on agentic AI, according to an internal email reviewed by Reuters, with AWS CEO Matt Garman positioning agentic AI as a potential multi-billion dollar opportunity for the cloud giant. While Amazon has demonstrated agentic capabilities, such as the ability to book Ubers or navigate websites, that are projected to be coming to Alexa+, an updated version of the company’s consumer voice assistant, AWS has yet to announce enterprise-specific AI agents.
Does a Group Focused on Agentic AI at AWS Signal Enterprise Prioritization?
Analyst Take: The announcement from cloud giant AWS that it is reportedly forming a group to specifically focus on the development of agentic AI is surprising, largely because of the previous absence of such a unit, given the high-profile nature of agentic AI over the past several months. Agentic AI has become the flagship enterprise offering from many tech companies, including Salesforce and Microsoft, and even companies that have significant offerings in adjacent spaces, such as Google and Oracle, are leaning into their agentic AI offerings as key differentiators.
That’s not to say that AWS has been ignoring agents, as evidenced by their planned rollout of agent-like features for their consumer-facing Alexa+ assistant. Amazon’s experience with Alexa and the upcoming Alexa+ provides a valuable testbed for agentic AI technologies in consumer applications. However, it is somewhat surprising that AWS had yet to officially set up a dedicated group to focus on the massive opportunities for deploying agentic AI across the dozens to hundreds of use cases within the enterprise, from contact center operations to collaboration, and numerous other front- and back-end business processes.
Despite the later entrance into the enterprise market, AWS will hardly be starting from scratch. AWS’s robust cloud computing infrastructure gives Amazon a strong foundation for developing and scaling agentic AI solutions. It should enable agents to easily access and leverage customer data held within its ecosystem, and the basic agentic tasks being delivered to the Alexa assistant should be easily modified to handle low-level enterprise tasks.
AWS’s long-standing investments in AI, including custom silicon such as Trainium and Inferentia, will likely serve as a key differentiator in scaling agentic AI workloads. Unlike competitors that rely on third-party GPUs, AWS may wield these technologies to optimize cost and performance for running enterprise-grade AI agents. This could enable AWS to position itself as the most cost-effective and high-performance platform for deploying and scaling AI agents, particularly for customers already using AWS-native AI/ML services such as Bedrock and SageMaker.
The larger question is how AWS will plan to go to market with AI agents, though AWS’s extensive enterprise customer base offers a ready market for agentic AI solutions. The space is increasingly growing more crowded, with major vendors each positioning their agents as being superior, in terms of the types of tasks and workflows they are capable of handling, or in their ability to leverage data from anywhere within or outside of an organization’s technology footprint.
The reality is that AWS enters an increasingly competitive agentic AI space where Microsoft and Google have already launched deep integrations within their enterprise ecosystems. Microsoft, with Copilot, has embedded agents across Office 365 and enterprise workflows, while Google has leveraged Gemini to enhance its productivity and cloud offerings. AWS’s success will likely depend on its ability to differentiate through open integration, security-first orchestration, and cloud cost advantages.
We may see AWS take a slightly different approach, given its strength as a cloud and data platform. AWS may position their agent offering as a vendor-agnostic orchestration platform that can not only help organizations create AI agents from scratch, or deploy agents based on pre-set templates, but ultimately manage all AI agents that touch an enterprise. As AI agents and their deployment profiles become more intertwined and complex, reaching across disparate organizations, systems, and data, organizations may seek out another AI agent platform to manage this complex dance.
In addition, AWS Marketplace has opened up its catalog to any SaaS vendor, regardless of whether they run on AWS or not. This approach may be indicative of a future agentic strategy as well, enabling AWS to capture additional market share beyond its own customer base. Amazon will probably look to open up AWS Marketplace for agentic AI skills, similar to the way that Salesforce did with their new skills marketplace, AgentExchange, this week.
Furthermore, AWS’s strength in data security and protection makes them a logical choice for serving as an orchestration layer, as they will be able to provide the security and governance controls that are not specific to an individual vendor, but an organization’s or workflow’s requirements.
Amazon’s new division focused on agentic AI at AWS represents a significant strategic move that could reshape the competitive landscape in the AI market. This development has several implications for the industry and Amazon’s position against competitors such as Salesforce and Microsoft:
- Accelerated Innovation: Amazon’s entry into agentic AI is likely to spur increased innovation and competition in the field. This could lead to faster development of AI technologies that can autonomously perform complex tasks across various industries.
- With AWS CEO Matt Garman describing agentic AI as a potential “multi-billion dollar business,” this move signals Amazon’s intent to capture a significant share of the emerging AI market. This could disrupt existing market dynamics and force other players to accelerate their own AI initiatives.
All told, this announcement raises more questions than answers, but we expect that AWS, given its size and influence in the market, will rapidly push forward with its plans. The agentic AI market continues to accelerate, and AWS is clearly not content to continue to sit on the sidelines.
What to Watch:
- Look for more clarity around AWS’s agentic AI positioning and strategy in the coming weeks and months, given the significant agentic news coming out of competitors on a near-weekly basis.
- Expect to hear partner announcements and a go-to-market framework as AWS fleshes out its plans.
- While Amazon is well-positioned to compete in the agentic AI space due to its cloud infrastructure and resources, success is not guaranteed. The company will need to leverage its strengths in cloud computing and consumer AI to develop compelling enterprise solutions that can compete with the specialized offerings of Salesforce and the broad applicability of Microsoft’s solutions.
- Competitors are likely to push back with their own counter-messaging, likely highlighting their head-start in the market, and public pilots and commercial deployments of agentic AI systems.
See the Reuters news article highlighting AWS’s foray into the agentic space here.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
AWS Marketplace Expanding Its SaaS Catalog: Will This Drive the Next Boom?
Amazon Delivers Strong Q4 FY 2024 with Record Operating Income, AWS Growth
AI Software Market Shows Strong Growth as Organizations Accelerate AI Adoption
Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
Dion Hinchcliffe is a distinguished thought leader, IT expert, and enterprise architect, celebrated for his strategic advisory with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. With over 25 years of experience, Dion works with the leadership teams of top enterprises, as well as leading tech companies, in bridging the gap between business and technology, focusing on enterprise AI, IT management, cloud computing, and digital business. He is a sought-after keynote speaker, industry analyst, and author, known for his insightful and in-depth contributions to digital strategy, IT topics, and digital transformation. Dion’s influence is particularly notable in the CIO community, where he engages actively with CIO roundtables and has been ranked numerous times as one of the top global influencers of Chief Information Officers. He also serves as an executive fellow at the SDA Bocconi Center for Digital Strategies.
