Partners have been ‘critical from day one’ at AWS, and the company’s agentic AI drive means they’re more important than ever

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be relying heavily on its extensive independent software vendor (ISV) and systems integrator (SI) networks to drive adoption of its new agentic AI services, according to a senior company figure.

Speaking to ITPro at AWS re:Invent, Rohan Karmarkar, managing director of AWS’ partnership solutions architecture, said partners will be critical in supporting successful integration for customers.

The annual conference, hosted at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, saw AWS announce a raft of new agentic AI-powered services, including a range of powerful ‘frontier agents’ and a platform aimed at helping enterprises build their own AI models.

This sharpened focus on agentic AI for AWS comes at a pivotal time in the evolution of the technology, according to CEO Matt Garman, and simplifying adoption will be crucial in this process.

Services like Amazon Bedrock and AgentCore will play a key role in this process, and Karmarkar emphasized that this is where partners will once again be the unsung heroes driving adoption.

“Our network has more than 140,000 partners,” he said. “Partners were critical for our business right from day one.”

Only the best for AWS customers

AWS maintains somewhat of a strict set of rules for partners, however. With a sprawling ecosystem, ensuring that customers are given access to the best of the best is a key value proposition for the hyperscaler.

For example, last year AWS launched its AI Competency scheme, which identifies preferred partners that can provide support in AI adoption, from the early stages to those later on in the implementation process.

“[We have] partners who can get the time to value quickly. We have a lot of partners doing that,” he said.

“This year we’ve evolved that [AI competency] to add agentic capabilities as well,” Karmarkar added.

“So in order to attain that competency, partners have to prove they have not just the technical capabilities they have around implementing AI applications and use-cases, but also customer success metrics, like whether these are in production or at the PoC stage.”

These preferred capabilities are crucial when validating partners for the Competency scheme, which at this stage includes over 45 partners, according to Karmarkar.

Success rates so far through this scheme are promising, Karmarkar told ITPro, and the hyperscaler closely monitors key metrics to ensure customers are getting the best bang for their buck.

“So when customers do projects with our AI Competency partners, they tend to have a 25% faster path to product,” he revealed. “That’s one of the metrics we do measure from the competency perspective.

“The other thing that is very critical for us as we work with partners is the right way of ‘working back from the customers’ - that’s within the AWS DNA where we try to understand what the outcome you want, and then start building a solution for that, rather than building a solution which starts from the technology.”

On the ISV front, this is an equally important focus for AWS, allowing customers to streamline the adoption and integration of technologies and tools.

“A lot of capabilities that ISVs are building in their own existing products, and new features in their products, these capabilities customers are going to get out of the box.”

Supporting partners

While partners play a critical role in supporting enterprise end-users, Karmarkar said the raft of agentic AI tools launched by the company this week is also intended to be a springboard for partners themselves.

This is a mantra that lies at the heart of the company’s long-running partnership focus; it’s an ecosystem that drives innovation across the board.

“The vision we have with a lot of the AI capabilities that we are launching is to make those capabilities not just for partners to consume, but also partners to extend from,” he explained.

“So they can build, bringing in their own expertise, to further differentiate themselves and to drive the right outcomes for the customers.”