How AWS has embraced AI agents—for itself and its clients

Ruba Borno, the leader of AWS’s Global Specialists and Partners organization, is spearheading the company's embrace of AI agents. These agents assist both AWS and its clients in leveraging AI advances for business impact. Borno herself has transformed her AWS Marketplace engineering organization, where humans outline requirements while AI generates code with the help of autonomous agents that handle incident triage and fixes without further prompting.

This shift has led to an 88% increase in shipping throughput, a 21% reduction in time to production, and consistent rollback rates. Over 76% of the code in production is now AI-assisted. Borno has established a firm policy: "We must use AI every day in nearly everything we do," she stated in a McKinsey presentation. AWS Partner Central has integrated AI agents to expedite sales opportunities, provide customized guidance, and direct deals to the appropriate personnel.

Since its launch, more than 1,000 partners have adopted these agents. To gain employee support for AI pilot programs, Borno emphasizes the importance of providing AI tools with essential contextual data through robust infrastructure that connects, labels, and organizes data, coupled with proper access controls. Without the correct data, AI models lack the necessary ground truth to generate valuable outputs, leading to a loss of trust among workers.

Borno also advises companies to rethink how they measure the success of AI initiatives. Many focus on ROI relative to existing processes and budgets, which often results in pilot failures. Borno asserts that the true value of AI lies in its ability to enable work that was previously unattainable.