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Overview
📖 AWS re:Invent 2025 -Generative AI excellence: How AWS Partners help customers from strategy to scale
In this video, the AWS AI Competency lead discusses generative AI adoption trends and partner opportunities. Key findings include 75% of customers using at least one generative AI application, 50% moving POCs to production, and 90% planning to implement agentic AI within 6-12 months. The presentation highlights critical barriers like data foundation issues, scalability challenges, and change management concerns. Notably, 80.5% of surveyed customers expect to maintain or increase partner reliance over the next 1-3 years, with 94% working with multiple partner types. The session concludes with AWS partner resources including the AI Competency program, Partner Central journey map, SkillBuilder courses, and the AI and Data Center for partners.
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Main Part
The Momentum of AI Adoption: From Generative AI to Agentic AI
Thank you. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining me. I'm super excited to be here. I know we're towards the end of our re:Invent adventure together, so thanks so much for spending the last few moments with me. I am here to talk about generative AI excellence. I'm super excited to be here. Now, it helps my talk track a little bit if you could just show me by raising hands who here is a customer or potential customer of AWS. Can I just get a show of hands, or are we mostly partners today of AWS? Okay, that's perfectly great.
So I mentioned, I lead the AI Competency. The AI Competency, as you might have heard yesterday from Ruba Borno, who leads our Specialist and Partner Organization all up at AWS, is AWS's top mechanism to help our customers locate partners that have specialized expertise, the technical abilities, and commercial success to help customers quickly move into production with AI. We're super excited to recently announce the Generative AI categories as well, so we're starting to welcome partners with capabilities in the Generative AI realm, which I'm sure you've heard a little bit about this week at this event.
But as the lead of this program, I have a fair amount of insight that I can draw on from what I'm seeing in terms of customer trends and partner success. But for this presentation, I'm going to go into, I'm going to lean on some survey results and data that we get from partners like McKinsey, BCG, IDC, and Deloitte. And I'm going to lean heavily on a study that my team has commissioned over the last three years, which is really fascinating. It helps to show the progression of this industry from generative AI now into agentic AI.
So I'm going to lean on some of this information to really talk about some trends that we're seeing from customers, where the adoption is happening. And as exciting and really just game-changing as this technology is, customers are still bumping into some barriers along the way to adoption. So I want to address what those are and really use that as a framework for our partners to understand where they are really most needed and where we're seeing success from our partner community. So that's the AWS Partner Advantage that Ruba talked about a lot yesterday, and I'll touch on.
I'll end with, for partners here that want to get sort of further afield in their AI partner journey, what resources we have available and what investments we're making so you all can join the ride. If anyone wants to connect with me later, this QR code will take you to a profile. My email is on there, LinkedIn, so happy to answer questions afterwards or just come find me. I'll be hanging around afterwards. So with that, I'll get into the first topic around AI trends and around adoption.
So I've been at AWS going on six years. The AI adoption is real, it's intense, it's incredible. The momentum is absolutely real. Nearly 75% of customers that we've polled recently in a McKinsey study are at least using one application for generative AI in business functions. 50% of customers have moved, they've transitioned POCs into production, so there's production success. The results are real. I'm sure we're all feeling it too inside of our own companies now. I know I am. My adoption of AI technology has increased by 20x at least, as has my productivity, so it's really cool.
But with 50%, there's plenty of room for growth. And interestingly and importantly, customers are really starting to realize the value as well in AI, with 40% polled recently showing, or have been showing that they've already moved into production and are seeing the benefits gain that they had expected, so it's fabulous. And the, we're seeing customers move from strategy into action. This is really happening at a top-down level as well. We see executive commitment in many companies now around their AI strategy, the rise of the Chief AI Officer.
In a recent poll, we saw 60% of companies that we work with now have this new role in terms of getting AI leadership in place, which is great. Budget prioritization, right, everyone's been focusing on how to get this into the hands of internal teams and to their customers. And then, as we've all heard this week, Agentic AI is here, it's live. Our Agentic AI partners have the case studies to show the work that's happening in the customer market too.
So that's where the future is headed, a little bit more about the transition now from generative AI into agentic AI. And this is where I'm going to start to lean on our commission survey now that's been three years running.
Barriers to Scaling AI and the Critical Role of Partners
90% of companies are looking to implement agentic within the next 6 to 12 months. So a lot of that excitement will come from re:Invent and into the workplace over the next half of a year. It's really great. We've seen the maturation of generative AI technology, and their perception has shifted to sort of, okay, with LLMs, chatbots, we're starting to get this down. We know what the top performers are, it's feeling a little easier to implement. Faster times to deployment, we can get those quick wins chalked up, but as we now transition to the agentic future, those expectations start to change again and now there's that perception of, you know, it's a little bit more complex.
There's more of a transformational nature to this technology that's going to require not just sort of technological prowess and know-how, but also the people and the processes that need to be updated to really take full advantage of that. So that's where we're headed now. I said it's really exciting. I've seen agentic apps. They're amazing, but that's not to say there aren't some barriers that we need to overcome at the customer level. So I bring this stat up here because I think it's important again a little bit around perception and reality.
In our data we're seeing that there's a whole bunch of customers that believe they're able to scale once they have an application that they have landed on that's successful, but in reality, only 40% are really starting to see AI in scale and production and out to scale. We're seeing common barriers, and I'll get a little bit more into this around, you know, data foundation, model scalability, technical challenges that are preventing them from reaching some scale. And our customer quotes really sum it up that we can all make MVPs, but to scale it out to something that's adopted and leveraged at scale is challenging.
And with the rise of so many technologies that you see around this room today in the expo hall, it's tricky to keep pace and there's risk with that constant change and development of technology. So very much where partners can come into play here. Now, technical pains around the adoption of use cases, this is something that is tied much more to now not just technology like I said, but the people and the process that need to adopt as well. And so, you know, things from like prolonged implementation, change management, hard to use solutions, limitations of tokens, and poor customer support.
I think partners that can kind of understand where these pain points are and have thought out a solution or a process around each one of these are the ones that can really start to stand out and make a difference as they come into contact with customers. So these are important ones to see and 50% of these top concerns are around people and process, which is pretty interesting. So I lead with all of that to get to kind of the meat of the presentation which is the roles that partners are playing, and this is where it gets really exciting because pretty much a resounding majority of customers that have been polled, and this survey went across the United States, all of Europe, we had about 2,500 respondents at the director level and above, so really senior management at these companies.
80.5% of these customers expect to maintain or increase their reliance and work that they do with partners over the next 1 to 3 years. So partners are really critical to the growth and adoption here of AI, and they're used and critical at every stage of the adoption journey from the ideation steps to exploring use cases into developing POCs, getting pilots stood up and getting fully deployed. And also I'm sure there's many different partner types here in this room and in this expo hall today. You know, 94% of the same customers polled are saying they use not just one partner that they're relying on but there's many different partners from foundation model providers, technology companies, ISVs, service providers, SIs. They all kind of fit in.
So I think knowing which partners in the, for example, AWS Partner Network that you can work with and that complement your solution and teaming up there is going to be a critical step.
And then lastly, I'll just touch on some of these deployment challenges, and like I said, 90% of their customers believe that partners are key to this. So it's these technical challenges like understanding the relevance and scale of these challenges and where you are able to fit in that's going to be key. So I think that's my last one around the data slides.
But before I go into where the partners are really starting to step in, I wanted to just summarize some of the key challenges that we see on the path to production. So anything from ideation, creating value around business cases, data strategies, having a strong process around governance, and of course, ensuring security and compliance aren't afterthoughts. Being super upfront and clear to your customer about what it is that you will be delivering on, right? So having some clear measurements around what success looks like, you know, being really upfront about, hey, this journey will take a little while, here's what the output is expected, being clear on how to evaluate your success as a partner is key. Change management I touched on. And then there's just such a skills gap right now, and I'll end with a little bit of resourcing that AWS has around how we can kind of uplevel skills within partner organizations and things that you can take into the customer conversation to help them with their expertise.
AWS Partner Resources: The AI Competency and Partner Journey Framework
So I will end here with a couple resources around the AI partner journey. I mentioned I lead the competency globally, but my team, the Data and AI Partner Go-to-Market team, we wake up every day thinking about how can we get partners in our network upleveled, upskilled, the go-to-market resources. So the competency is part of that. But this journey slide is new, so if there's any Chutes and Ladders fans out there who grew up on that, maybe it'll resonate with the slide. I will not read every single point on this slide, I guarantee it. But I did want to just show it for awareness and there's a QR code there, so please do grab that. It will take you to Partner Central where you can really just for the first time have it all mapped out in terms of the four key pillars that we really try to help our partners with, and that would be the build, market, co-sell, and grow stages, right?
So meaning we want to help you develop AI-ready solutions, so helping you to define your AI strategy, getting amplification and visibility in the market, developing your go-to-market plan, driving that engagement and co-sell. So how do you coordinate and get alignment with AWS sellers who are talking to the same customers and how can we rely on our strategy to get into their customer account? We've got a ton of ideas there. And then lastly to really elevate our partners' abilities and get them connected to our premium marketing activations and game changers and ebooks and things like that, we definitely recommend getting into this competency, proving out your validation. And so, yeah, take a look at this, and I'm excited to hear what you think because there's, I guarantee there are things in here that you haven't really taken advantage of yet, but need to be, and so we're trying to bring that awareness.
Now, the competency is really getting a lot of attention these days because the AI space is a very noisy area right now. I get it. Like there's a lot of opportunity here. The technology is so enticing, it's so exciting, so everyone's talking about it. But it's, like I said, it's our way of communicating to customers which partners have gone through this strong validation and demonstrated that commercial success. So we try to be that signal in the noise, and our survey results also showed that, you know, obviously a must-have as a partner is your ability to showcase that you can quickly execute wins around the AI space. You have a dedicated AI practice, of course, if you're in the agentic space, you want to be able to showcase that. But now we're seeing also that the validation of a cloud provider like AWS with your developers or with your organization as well is really helping to get you noticed.
Customers are starting to get attuned to relying on competencies and understanding which partners can help them the most. You can see these badges here. We have now converted our Generative AI Competency into the AI Competency, so make sure you have the right badge that showcases your organization's skill set, whether it's services or software. Now, also importantly, within your own organization, you can get individuals both in the executive track, sales, or technical to be individually badged based on their learning skill sets that we have through SkillBuilder. We've just released some new agentic AI courses that are really worth checking out, and as the data backs, our customers are expecting this now.
I will leave you all with this summarization slide. If you think about the start of the journey, I always recommend, even if you're Accenture and you've been doing this for a little while and have all the accolades, get to know our AI and Data Center. It's designed specifically for AWS Partners. It's updated every single day, and every activation that you saw on that slide earlier is located there for anything from the latest customer research to get your company just really in lockstep with the types of insights that AWS has access to and is bringing to market, to sales plays, the latest rounds, our service offerings and products. We've got agentic AI resources in there and a use case library, so if you don't know where to start yet or want to get some ideas about what's being successful or resonating with customers from our partners' perspective, there's an amazing catalog there.
Probably the recommendation I have the most is this partner playbook. This asset we've had for the last three years really is that sort of playbook about how a partner gets the most alignment with AWS through every single step of that journey. That QR code will take you there and will be a really good place to just bookmark and check back. That's all I had today. I just wanted to raise some awareness of how we can support you, how critical partners are, and all the work that you're doing to help our customers. So from AWS, thank you for the work that you do and thanks for attending the session today. Hope that was helpful. Thanks.
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