AWS is taking the grunt work out of building and deploying AI agents

Amazon Web Services (AWS) wants to make building and deploying advanced AI agents feel like a walk in the park.

At AWS’s annual Summit in New York City in mid-July, the cloud giant unveiled Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a suite of services that aim to take on the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” of building AI agents at scale. Announced AgentCore tools included:

• AgentCore Runtime: A serverless runtime environment that is framework and protocol agnostic.
• AgentCore Identity: A designated identity and credential management service for AI agents.
• AgentCore Gateway: A service that allows existing APIs and Lambda functions to be made into “agent-ready” tools “with just a few lines of code.”
• AgentCore Observability: A tool that enables developers to “trace, debug, and monitor” their AI agent’s performance.
• AgentCore Memory: A service with both short-term and long-term memory capabilities that allow developers control over the context their agent has.
• AgentCore Code Interpreter: A service that allows AI agents to write and execute code in a sandbox environment.
• AgentCore Browser: A “secure, isolated” cloud-based browser environment that allows agents to interact with websites.

The set of services, currently available in preview, can either be used in its entirety or on an individual basis. Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS’s VP for agentic AI, said in his keynote that AgentCore was a “step change” for securely moving agents from proof of concepts into production.

“It provides tools and capabilities to make agents more effective and more capable, purpose-built infra to securely scale agents and provide the controls to enable you to build trustworthy agents,” Sivasubramanian said during the July 16 keynote.

What’s new at the market. In addition to AgentCore, AWS announced that AI agents and tools from its partners will now be available on the AWS marketplace. The move will allow customers to purchase agentic solutions with “streamlined procurement and multiple deployment options.”

“With this launch, you have access to a centralized catalog of AI agents, tools, solutions, and services from popular vendors,” Sivasubramanian said.

Perfect timing. The announcements come as companies are going all in on AI agents to enhance their workflows. A 2024 Capgemini report found that 82% of organizations plan to incorporate AI agents in their companies within one to three years.