The big annual Amazon Web Services (AWS) conference—re:Invent—is now in the rearview mirror. The conference has around 65,000 attendees, and at almost $2,000 per ticket, that's no mean feat. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), coming up in January, still wears the crown for the largest event/trade show in Las Vegas, but with expo tickets selling for $350 the stakes are considerable lower.
re:Invent has in fact gotten so large, that AWS heavily limits how many people from AWS can attend. Since Amazon doesn't break out employee count by division, it's difficult to know for sure how many people work in the AWS group, but LinkedIn has over 150,000 people who say they work there.
The main point: AWS re:Invent is big.
In addition to hundreds of workshops, happy hour events, lectures, award ceremonies, and dinners, one of the most important things that happens at re:Invent is new AWS product launches.
For the non-technical person, these product launches might not seem terribly exciting, but given the position that technology and AI are playing in our society right now, paying attention to what AWS is announcing now, can help us to predict and prepare for the new future.
For anyone who's attended ANY work conference over the past year, they have surely heard every vendor is talking about "AI agents". But what are agents? Beyond being a business buzzword, an agent can be defined thus:
AI agents are stateful, long-running systems that use GenAI models—like ChatGPT, or Claude—to reason and act through "tools".
Tools (yes, this is what they are really called) can be further thought of as "apps for bots". Things like browsers, email, math engines, calendar integrations, etc.
Like any good work conference in the year 2025, AWS re:Invent was replete with agents, most notably four that were given special attention during the keynote given by Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon:
• Security Agent - independently tests the security of applications and IT environments.
• DevOps Agent - independently maintains the health of your IT environment, fixing servers when they go down.
• Kiro - an agent used by software developers to write code
• AWS Transform - an agentic system used to upgrade legacy software systems like mainframes or old .NET systems whole cloth
Amazon has labeled these first three agents "Frontier Agents", which are designed to operate independently for hours without human intervention. They are designed to operate in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a platform created to make using agents easier.
The implications of the agents are huge: unlocking the possibility of improved security, lower cost IT operations, rapidly writing new code, and the migration of old code bases previously best ignored.
And these products are coming just in time. Bad bots are coming. They are going to find and exploit any technological weaknesses that exist in systems anywhere and everywhere. Companies understand this. This year in a surveys of CIOs, ~43% report planning to invest in cybersecurity products and solutions, making it a top functional priority alongside data analytics.
Far from being comprehensive, this was just the tip of the product-berg. AWS added 18 fully managed open weight models to Amazon Bedrock, including new models from Google, OpenAI, and DeepSeek:
And for anyone who wants to speed run through some more product launces, here's Matt Garman, who did 25 product launches in 10 minutes at the tail end of his keynote. WARNING: this gets nerdy.
So where does this leave us?
Far from slowing down the pace of technological change, Big Tech is pushing forward with even more tools. For technology partners like Metal Toad, we are trying to help our customers sort the marketing bluster from real value. With each new major move, there's an opportunity to map things out, and in many cases apply for funding from these very same tech companies.
Below is a copy of our AI roadmap, which maps milestones for an AI rollout, and calls out the specific points where AWS can help companies de-risk AI through financial underwriting:
When it comes to AI, you are still not late. But you should not be waiting on the sidelines for much longer.