Dive Brief:
- AWS plans to expand agentic AI services within its Generative AI Innovation Center backed by a $100 million investment announced Tuesday. The allocated capital will also go towards partner collaboration and personnel development.
- The cloud provider said the initiative has helped thousands of companies — such as the NFL, Formula 1, Fox, Yahoo Finance, BMW Group and AstraZeneca — shape AI efforts since first launching in 2023. Participating enterprises can tap Amazon’s team of AI scientists and tech pros to work alongside internal teams and solve implementation challenges.
- “Our doubled investment in the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center marks the next chapter in our commitment to helping our customers drive AI innovation,” AWS said in a release. “We’re expanding agentic capabilities, deepening collaborations with startups, advancing forward deployed engineering and scaling partner programs to help accelerate customer journeys.”
Dive Insight:
Enterprise interest in AI agents is widespread, but most CIOs are running up against an array of adoption roadblocks.
Analysts have pointed to security and governance concerns as common pain points, often followed by integration with legacy systems and organizational readiness. With challenges aplenty, Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled over the next year and a half.
Despite implementation difficulties, enterprises across industries continue to prioritize AI investments. Companies have doubled down even as changing trade policies and consumer spending patterns add pressure.
Vendors, which are pouring resources into the technology and, in turn, counting on enterprise spending, are working to lower the barriers to entry. AI providers are adding more ways to validate generated responses and actions, improve monitoring capabilities and enable governance controls. They’ve also released tools to ease agent development and access.
AWS’ innovation center represents the vendor's efforts to provide more hands-on help. Enterprises have interacted with the innovation center team in a variety of stages, from ideation to implementation, according to Taimur Rashid, managing director of generative AI innovation and delivery at AWS.
“In some cases, they’ll come to us with a specific use case or set of use cases that they need help on, but we noticed early on … the biggest choke point for most customers was saying, ‘Where should we start?’” Rashid told CIO Dive.
The innovation center team has since created a rubric of criteria to inform enterprises’ prioritization efforts and help identify high-value use cases.
“When we made our initial investment, it was money well spent because customers needed that bridge from technology to education and then ultimately to get them to utilize it more broadly,” Rashid said. “We are repeating on that theme, just at a much different scale with agentic AI.”
AWS isn't alone in mobilizing its resources to spur enterprise AI adoption. Google Cloud leaned on Accenture, Deloitte and KPMG to help clients overcome implementation hurdles earlier this year. Last year, Microsoft poured $3.3 billion into a Wisconsin initiative that included an AI Co-Innovation Lab for manufacturers.
