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No, it’s not a TikTok aesthetic that involves dressing like a spy: AgentCore is a new toolkit from Amazon’s cloud arm designed to help companies build and deploy AI agents.
With these autonomous systems billed as the next big thing in AI, companies everywhere are itching to create some of their own. But like all generative AI projects, moving from experiments to full-fledged production can be daunting.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is the latest in a long line of new products from tech giants aimed at easing that process. The platform has tools for managing memory, observability, helping agents access other digital services and the web at large, running generated code, and coordinating between agents.
Amazon announced AgentCore, along with a new agent marketplace and a coding tool called Kiro, at its AWS Summit in Manhattan last week.
“There are a bunch of missing pieces that make it really difficult [to] move from [proofs of concept] that are sitting in laptops to agents in real-world production use cases,” Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of AWS Agentic AI, said on stage at the event.
What’s different: The hype around agents seems as strong as ever at the moment, and enterprises have plenty of choices when it comes to these kinds of tools. Microsoft, Google, and other tech companies have their own agentic builders for customers looking to delegate to so-called “digital labor.”
Preethi CN, tech executive and advisor for agentic AI at AWS, told Tech Brew that one of the key things that sets AgentCore apart from this crowded field is flexibility. All of the component services are independent, CN said, and customers can “pick and choose” between them as needed. Companies are also not tied to Amazon’s own Nova foundation models; they can choose any of the catalog of models that Bedrock offers.
That kind of flexibility might be useful for a customer like Intuit, which has already built many of these agentic tools on its own through an internal tool called GenOS, according to Intuit SVP and chief data officer Ashok Srivastava. He said his team will explore these new AgentCore tools and decide if and where they might make sense for the new agents the financial software giant recently released.
“When we built the agents that we launched a few weeks ago, a lot of these technologies weren’t available, and so we built our own,” Srivastava told Tech Brew. “As [cloud providers] build these capabilities out—if it makes sense—we can adopt them into our platform.”
New frontiers: Meanwhile, Amazon has also assembled an agent R&D lab in San Francisco built around its quasi-acquisition of agent startup Adept last year. The Amazon AGI SF Lab’s goal is to “develop new foundational capabilities for enabling useful AI agents that can take actions in the digital and physical worlds.”
Kelsey Szot, former co-founder and president of Adept, who’s now a member of the technical staff at the AGI SF Lab, said the lab is dedicated to research questions that lead to end results for AWS customers. The lab recently yielded a model called Nova Act, which powers agents to complete tasks within web browsers.
Szot said reliability has been the biggest obstacle for companies taking agents from experimentation to production—but that’s finally changing.
“Unfortunately, in the field, the last few years have seen a ton of demos and not a lot of real results of actual production deployments that are having business impact in the agent space,” Szot told Tech Brew. “It’s only now that we’re seeing the level of reliability that we need to actually make this possible.”