AWS launched AgentCore for enterprise AI agents. While not aimed at small businesses today, it signals where accessible AI is heading.
Amazon Web Services just announced Amazon Bedrock AgentCore at their New York Summit, a new platform for deploying AI agents at scale.
While AWS is clearly targeting enterprise customers, the announcement raises interesting questions about what this technology could mean for smaller businesses down the line.
What AWS actually announced
Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP for Agentic AI, outlined the company’s strategy around AI agents, calling them “autonomous software systems that leverage AI to reason, plan and adapt to complete” tasks. He described this as “a tectonic change” that “upends the way software is built” and “changes how software interacts with the world—and how we interact with software.” AgentCore is designed to help organizations move AI agents “from prototypes to applications that can scale to millions of end-users.” Current customers testing the platform include Itaú Unibanco, Innovaccer, Boomi, Epsilon, and Box.
AWS is offering seven main components as part of AgentCore. AgentCore Runtime handles both interactive experiences with low latency and complex asynchronous workloads running up to eight hours, which AWS claims is “the longest in the industry.” It’s also “the only framework agnostic offering that provides complete session isolation.” AgentCore Memory provides what AWS calls “industry-leading long-term and short-term memory accuracy” to help build context-aware agents. AgentCore Identity handles secure authentication, integrating with existing identity providers like Amazon Cognito, Microsoft Entra ID, and Okta. AgentCore Gateway provides secure access to tools and APIs, while AgentCore Code Interpreter lets agents write and execute code in sandbox environments for calculations, data processing, or visualizations. AgentCore Browser Tool gives agents access to a cloud-based browser for website interactions, and AgentCore Observability offers real-time visibility through dashboards and telemetry for 81 key metrics.
New marketplace and investment
AWS also unveiled “AI Agents and Tools” in AWS Marketplace, allowing customers to “discover, buy, deploy, and manage AI agents and tools from leading providers.” This creates what AWS calls “a one-stop shop for AI agent solutions and tools.”
To support development in this space, AWS announced a second $100 million investment in the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, building on two years of work with “thousands of customers around the world.” AWS highlighted several customer success stories. Warner Bros. Discovery Sports Europe developed an AI solution to help bike racing commentators research facts quickly using Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5. BMW built an AI system that helps diagnose network issues for over 23 million connected vehicles. Companies like Syngenta and AstraZeneca have also implemented agentic AI solutions.
What this could mean for smaller businesses
While AWS clearly designed AgentCore for enterprise customers, the announcement signals where AI technology is heading. The marketplace approach, in particular, could eventually make AI agent capabilities more accessible to smaller businesses through third-party providers. The key question isn’t whether this specific platform will work for your business today, but whether you should start thinking about how AI agents might fit into your operations as the technology becomes more accessible. The examples AWS shared show AI agents handling customer research, vehicle diagnostics, and other real-world business tasks.
As Sivasubramanian noted, this technology “changes how software interacts with the world.” For businesses of any size, understanding what AI agents can do and where the technology is headed could be important for staying competitive. The challenge for smaller businesses will be figuring out when and how to adopt these capabilities as they become available through more accessible platforms and pricing models.
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