"While the engineers slept, the agents kept building": AWS UK chief touts big gains with AI-powered coding

Software developers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) are recording marked efficiency gains with AI tools, according to the company’s UK chief.

Speaking at the AWS Summit London, Alison Kay, VP and managing director for the UK & Ireland, told attendees that developers are relying heavily on its own Kiro coding tool to speed up processes.

Indeed, devs at the firm have been able to successfully deliver projects that previously would have been extensive in a far more efficient manner.

“At AWS we needed to completely rebuild the inference engine behind Bedrock from scratch,” she explained. “Now, if you'd asked me two years ago what that would’ve taken, I would’ve said ‘40 engineers, 12 months, and a whole lot of coffee’.”

Using AI, Kay noted this rebuild project was completed by six engineers in just 76 days.

“They weren’t working alone,” she added. “They were working alongside Kiro agents that wrote code, tested it, found bugs, fixed them, and deployed it around the clock. While the engineers slept, the agents kept building.”

AWS announced the launch of Kiro in mid-2025, and since launch has received a series of updates. At the company’s annual re:Invent conference in December 2025, the coding service received a big upgrade with new agentic capabilities.

As ITPro reported at the time, the Kiro Autonomous agent maintains “persistent context” across the development lifecycle, essentially lingering in the background and supporting human developers.

Talking up AI

Much like its competitors, AWS has been keen to emphasize both the capabilities of its own AI tools, but also how staff are using them across the company.

Speaking during a podcast appearance last year, CEO Matt Garman noted around 80% of developers at the firm were using AI “in some way” on a daily basis.

Notably, Microsoft and Google both touted the increasing use of AI-generated source code, which, at the time, Garman suggested was a “silly metric” by which to measure internal AI successes.

“There might be bad code, by the way. Measuring lines of code is never actually the best metric. Oftentimes, fewer lines of code is way better than more lines, so I’m never really sure why that’s the exciting metric that people like to brag about.”

Increased AI use at AWS isn’t restricted to software development, either. Speaking to ITPro at AWS re:Invent in December last year, CISO Amy Herzog revealed security practitioners have ramped up use of agentic AI tools in areas such as CVE attribution and threat detection.

Indeed, Herzog revealed security teams had recorded a “500% increase” in helping practitioners “piece together” information on emerging threats and vulnerabilities.

So far, Herzog noted there has been a “500% increase” in the company’s ability to “piece together information” for security teams on this front.

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