AWS CEO Matt Garman says AI agents will have 'as much impact on your business as the internet or cloud'

AWS CEO Matt Garman believes AI agents will have as profound an effect on global business as the advent of the web or cloud computing.

Speaking at the company’s annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week, Garman pointed to the rapid evolution of AI over the last three years.

Initial tinkering with chatbots and AI assistants has now given way to an influx of agents, which are capable of operating autonomously in the background in place of workers rather than supplementing workflows.

This new paradigm in the AI space will have a huge long-term effect on business efficiency and individual productivity, Garman noted.

“Every single customer experience, every single company, frankly every single industry, is now in the process of being reinvented, and we’re still in the early days of what AI is going to deliver,” he told attendees.

“It wasn’t that long ago that we were all testing and experimenting with chatbots, and now it seems like there’s something new every day.”

Garman said that engagement with customers has highlighted poor returns on the technology so far in the generative AI race. Returns on investment have been a recurring talking point despite bold promises from big tech providers.

“Many of you out there, you haven’t yet seen the returns that match up to the promise of AI, the true value of AI has not yet been unlocked. But a lot of that is changing fast”

With agents, Garman expects enterprises will finally begin unlocking real value from the technology.

“This is where we’re starting to see material business returns from your AI investments,” he told attendees. “I believe that the advent of AI agents has brought us to an inflection point in AI’s trajectory.”

“This change is going to have as much impact on your business as the internet or the cloud,” Garman added. “I believe that in the future, there’s going to be billions of agents inside of every company and across every imaginable field.”

Are AI agents delivering on the hype?

Agentic AI has become a contentious topic over the last year. With Salesforce striking an initial lead on this front with the launch of its Agentforce service, big tech providers across the board have jumped on the bandwagon.

Just last month, Microsoft announced a slew of new agentic AI features across its core product and service lines, from Windows to Azure and Microsoft 365, agents are now deeply embedded across the breadth of the company’s products.

However, as with AI assistants and ‘copilots’, questions still remain over whether the technology is delivering tangible benefits for businesses or individual workers. This emerging aspect of the broader AI industry has also become swamped by hype and hyperbole.

Research from Gartner earlier this year suggested that a culture of “agent washing” had emerged as solutions providers scrambled to pivot to the new trend.

Gartner said the majority of products reviewed were essentially “repackaged” chatbots and robotic process automation (RPA) solutions.

AWS appears confident that its range of AI agents very much meet expectations, dubbing them “frontier agents” that represent a step up from the traditional class of agents out there on the market.

Frontier agents, by AWS’ definition, are capable of operating fully autonomously for hours or days without human intervention. Moreover, they’re highly scalable and continuously improve by shadowing human workers, monitoring activities and processes and reacting accordingly.

The company launched three new frontier agents at re:Invent this week, with a particular focus on streamlining processes in software development.

Agentic features in the Kiro coding tool, along with a dedicated AWS Security Agent and DevOps Agent look to speed up production across the entirety of the software development lifecycle.

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