AWS debuts Bedrock AgentCore and AI-agent marketplace

The curtain lifted on AWS Summit New York this morning (in New York of course) with vice‑president Swami Sivasubramanian announcing Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a new server‑less runtime that lets developers spin up production‑grade AI agents in minutes. AgentCore arrives in public preview today, rolling out first in the us‑east‑1 and us‑west‑2 regions, and ships with built‑in memory, identity, browser, code‑interpreter, observability and policy‑gateway modules so enterprises can skip boilerplate and go straight to task automation.

Amazon coupled the launch with a dedicated “AI Agents & Tools” aisle in AWS Marketplace. Beginning next week customers will be able to browse, trial and subscribe to pre‑built autonomous workers—everything from invoice reconcilers to security‑log sentinels—then deploy them directly inside their own accounts with the click of a button. Anthropic is the inaugural anchor tenant, offering a family of Claude‑powered agents whose usage fees flow through normal AWS billing; Amazon takes a single‑digit revenue share in exchange for distribution and in‑cloud hosting.

To jump‑start adoption, AWS is injecting an additional $100 million into its Generative AI Innovation Center, doubling the programme’s budget and earmarking the new money specifically for AgentCore proof‑of‑concepts and marketplace integrations across finance, retail and healthcare. The goal, according to Sivasubramanian, is to help customers “move from dabbling to doing” by pairing them with AWS and Anthropic solution architects who can transform white‑board ideas into compliant, revenue‑generating agents.

The trio of announcements positions Amazon squarely in the rising agentic‑AI land‑grab. Microsoft already touts an M365 Agent Store, Google Cloud has a Gemini Agent Marketplace, and Salesforce, ServiceNow and Oracle are pushing similar exchanges. Yet AWS still runs more enterprise workloads than all rivals combined, and analysts note that even a modest three‑percent attach rate on the cloud giant’s existing customer base could translate into billions of dollars in incremental annual run rate by 2028. Investors watching Amazon’s Q2 earnings later this month will be looking for early signs that the new marketplace and AgentCore consumption can offset slowing traditional IaaS growth.

For builders, the immediate takeaway is speed. What used to be a six‑month cycle of scaffolding, testing and compliance can now be reduced to a single console workflow, while the marketplace gives startups global reach on day one. For AWS, today’s keynote signals a strategic shift from selling raw AI primitives to curating an ecosystem of ready‑to‑work digital employees—turning the cloud provider into the landlord of an emerging agent economy and setting the stage for a wave of autonomous software that will quietly handle back‑office chores across every industry sector.