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Amazon has formed a new group focused on agentic artificial intelligence within its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division. Reuters broke the news on Tuesday after viewing an internal email that was sent to AWS employees. Amazon has not yet made a public announcement about it.
AI agents are designed to automatically complete tasks without users having to prompt them. Basically, agentic AI can execute actions without a user having to perform a specific triggering event first. Agentic AIs are a particular subtype of AI tools that focus on automating routine tasks.
New AWS group for agentic AI
According to the email, the new group for agentic artificial intelligence will be led by executive Swami Sivasubramanian, whose title on LinkedIn is VP of AWS Agentic AI. Sivasubramanian will report directly to AWS CEO Matt Garman, who wrote the internal email sent to AWS staff.
“Agentic AI has the potential to be the next multi-billion business for AWS,” Garman allegedly wrote in the email. He went on to say that, “We have the opportunity to help our customers innovate even faster and unlock more possibilities, and I firmly believe that AI agents are core to this next wave of innovation.”
Amazon’s recent push for agentic AI includes Alexa+
This new AWS group isn’t Amazon’s first foray into the world of agentic AI. Last week, the company announced that new agentic AI capabilities would soon be coming to Alexa, the company’s voice assistant AI tool.
The newly upgraded version will be called Alexa+, to distinguish it from the earlier versions. Alexa+ will reportedly be able to perform certain actions on its own even if users don’t issue a specific voice command or ask a question.
The Alexa+ service is free for Prime members but will cost $19.99 per month for non-members. Alexa+ will become available to U.S. households soon, starting with certain models of the HD smart display Echo Show devices. The first Echo Show models to get access to the agentic AI Alexa are 8, 10, 15, and 21.
More AWS reorganization in the works
The creation of the agentic AI group won’t be the only change at AWS. In another internal email sent on Tuesday, AWS senior vice president Peter DeSantis revealed several additional reorganizations are in the works. Three groups – hardware engineering, the Bedrock AI group, and the SageMaker AI group – will be moved underneath the compute organization. A new group will also be formed by combining customer experience and commerce.