Amazon introduces new AI agents

SEATTLE – Amazon is introducing new AI agents that act autonomously but allow humans to maintain control of how much the agents do on their own.

The new agents for businesses, developers, and individuals were announced this week at the Amazon Web Services Summit in New York, where they were described as capable of  helping humans and organizations work more safely and effectively. 

"One of the remarkable things about agents is the more you use them, the more you get done,” Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president agentic AI at AWS, said in introducing the agents. “More interactions give agents more context. More context leads to better outcomes. Those better outcomes increase how much you trust them. The more trust you have, the more work you hand off to them.

“That compounding momentum widens the gap between companies that embrace AI and those who do not. While every business has unique challenges and obstacles to overcome, the innovations we launched today are aimed at helping you more effectively put agents to work and accelerate how you solve problems.”

A new security agent, called AWS Continuum, starts in a supervised “learn mode” and earns the right to act alone only as customers grant it permission, category by category.

The Amazon Quick AI assistant allow users to build their own background agents in plain language to handle such tasks as flagging regulatory changes or working to nudge along stalled projects. 

A redesigned Quick activity feed triages email, messages, and calendar items into one prioritized view, and can tap multiple connected services to answer a single question.

A new iPhone app for Kiro, the company’s AI coding assistant, allows developers to  start and monitor the work from their phones. It’s part of the push by AWS to have its coding agents to take on more of the busy work, checking and testing new code before it ships and cleaning up old code, while leaving the final decision to merge or deploy in the hands of humans.