Amazon’s Swami Sivasubramanian to lead new group focused on AI agents

Amazon.com Inc. is getting serious about artificial intelligence-powered agents, and has reportedly formed a new group within its cloud infrastructure business to focus on the technology.

According to an internal email seen by Reuters, the group will focus on ways in which AI agents can automate more of its customer’s lives.

The email, which was authored by AWS Chief Executive Matt Garman, said the new agentic AI group will be headed up by veteran Amazon Web Services executive Swami Sivasubramanian (pictured), who previously led the company’s AI and data teams.

“Agentic AI has the potential to be the next multi-billion business for AWS,” Garman wrote to employees in the email. The group’s work will take on a lot of importance, for Sivasubramanian will report directly to Garman on its progress, the email added.

AI agents are more advanced AI systems designed to automate tasks for users, so they don’t have to waste time prompting them to take actions on their behalf. They’ve become one of the hottest trends in the AI industry today, building on the capabilities of generative AI chatbots. Examples include OpenAI’s Operator and Deep Research tools. Other big technology firms, such as Salesforce Inc., Google LLC, ServiceNow Inc. and Microsoft Corp., have also invested significant amounts of money into the technology.

Amazon has too, and last week it announced some of its first agentic AI capabilities will be coming to its voice service Alexa later this month. Among other things, Alexa will be able to order groceries, book Uber rides and make dinner reservations at restaurants on behalf of users.

“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,” Garman added.

It’s likely that the AWS unit is also interested in the possibilities enabled by AI agents, and it could well look at developing tools for automating cloud infrastructure management, coding tasks and so on.

The new group isn’t the only change. Earlier today, AWS Senior Vice President Peter DeSantis penned a separate internal email, also seen by Reuters, which revealed that the company’s AI services Amazon BedRock and Amazon SageMaker will be shifted into the compute organization. DeSantis is also creating another new group, which will combine customer experiences and commerce. The changes will help the company “accelerate innovation,” the executive said.

Photo: SiliconANGLE