Amazon gives $100M boost to AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, betting on agentic AI
Amazon is using its cloud platform to help customers expand into agentic AI. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Amazon is investing another $100 million in its AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, aiming to help companies go from experimenting with AI to integrating it into core business operations.
The center, launched in 2023 with an initial $100 million in funding, pairs AWS customers with Amazon engineers, data scientists, and strategists to develop practical AI solutions. It has worked with organizations including BMW, Formula 1, Warner Bros. Discovery, AstraZeneca, the PGA Tour, Yahoo Finance, and others.
Examples cited by the company include AI systems that speed up factory troubleshooting, analyze financial news in real time, and automate the selection of marketing images based on branding and emotional cues.
Francessca Vasquez, AWS VP for Professional Services and Agentic AI.
'The only way you get to value is by actually putting things into production and having production success,' said Francessca Vasquez, AWS vice president for Professional Services and Agentic AI, describing the initiative in an interview this week for an upcoming GeekWire Podcast episode.
The new funding, announced Tuesday morning, comes amid fierce competition in enterprise AI. Amazon is seeking to position its cloud infrastructure as the foundational layer for business deployments of generative and agentic AI — a strategy that pits it directly against Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and a growing field of startups.
The Seattle tech giant's solutions leverage AWS technologies and platforms including its Bedrock generative AI model marketplace and its Amazon Nova brand of AI foundation models, among others.
Amazon's increased investment also comes at a challenging moment for the broader professional services industry, as traditional IT consulting firms grapple with AI's potential to transform their business models and potentially automate many of the services they currently provide.
With the new funding, the Generative AI Innovation Center is increasing its focus on agentic AI, which can autonomously plan and execute complex tasks, beyond simple chat interactions.
AWS cited a Gartner prediction that 15% of work decisions will be made by autonomous agents by 2028. Vasquez said she believes that may underestimate the pace of progress.
However, the same Gartner report also pointed to the risks inherent to aggressive adoption of agentic AI — predicting that more 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls.
Vasquez acknowledged those risks but pointed to AWS's track record of beating industry averages. While most companies only get 30% of AI proof-of-concepts into production, she said the Innovation Center has surpassed a 50% success rate and is targeting 80% for 2025.
She attributed the higher success rate to several key factors among customers: strong leadership commitment, solid business cases, and proper data foundations.
Listen for our full conversation with Francessca Vasquez on the GeekWire Podcast this weekend.
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