AWS: Partners will drive agentic AI uptake

The cloud giant is rolling out new solutions and looking to partners to deliver business outcomes for customers.

As business processes are profoundly altered by technology including agentic AI, partners are the critical driver of successful transformation.

Chris Casey, director AWS partnerships APJ explained that this is an area where partners help.

“Disambiguating some of the for technology for customers,” he noted.

Casey said AWS works with a shared commitment to leverage partners and scale its capability and capacity as it’s helping customers through that journey.

That includes dedicated training to ensure partners have the expertise needed to deploy its solutions to address business challenges and projects. In Australia, AWS has trained more than 400,000 people, and in New Zealand, it's more than 50,000 including customers and partners.

“It's really important they're skilled and know how to use the latest tooling from AWS so they can run, operate and continue to expand their projects,” said Casey, speaking at this week’s AWS Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

With organisations tackling so many different projects, from mainframe modernisation and migration to developing AI agents, AWS wants to provide the critical services and capabilities, but it looks to partners to deliver the value proposition for the customer.

“Helping them triage what is going to add value for them, their role and their responsibilities within the business is an area where partners really help,” Casey told CRN Australia.

The starting point is always the customer and their needs to design solutions based on business needs rather than technology first.

“In terms of our roadmap, AWS can build features and components into our services, but you will consistently hear us talking about working backwards from customers,” he said.

Casey is bullish about the potential of agentic AI to fundamentally rewrite the rule book.

“We certainly believe it could transform every imaginable consumer experience. It's the people, the processes around it as well as the actual underlying technology,” he said.

AWS released a host of new tools and updates at its annual user conference Re:Invent 2025 in Las Vegas this week. There’s a strong focus on agentic AI, including autonomous agents, custom AI models, new tools for organisations to develop private AI models and new custom chips for AI workloads.

AWS has also updated the generative AI competency to include more agentic AI, taking the view that being prescriptive helps guide partners and ultimately aids customers to find the right partner for their needs.

With so much on offer, Casey believes partner competencies and specialisations act as important signals when customers are seeking providers, particularly in a platform like Marketplace.

“It can be a vast universe [of available solutions] and it’s helping streamline the process of finding which partners with the capability and capacity to deliver the required business outcome,” he ended.

Rosalyn Page travelled to AWS Re:Invent 2025 as a guest of AWS.