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AI goes from tool to teammate: Amazon Web Services SVP Colleen Aubrey on the dawn of agentic work
LAS VEGAS — Speaking this week on the Amazon Web Services re:Invent stage, AWS executive Colleen Aubrey delivered a prediction that doubled as a wake-up call for companies still thinking of AI as just another tool.
“I believe that over the next few years, agentic teammates can be essential to every team — as essential as the people sitting right next to you,” Aubrey said during the Wednesday keynote. “They will fundamentally transform how companies build and deliver for their customers.”
But what does that look like in practice? On her own team, for example, she challenged groups that once had 50 people taking nine months to deliver a new product to do the same with 10 people working for three months.
Meanwhile, non-engineers such as finance analysts are building working prototypes using AI tools, contributing code in Amazon’s Kiro agentic development tool alongside engineers and feeding those prototypes into Amazon’s famous PR/FAQ planning process on weekly cycles.
Those are some of the details that Aubrey shared when we sat down with her after the keynote at the GeekWire Studios booth in the re:Invent expo hall to dig into the themes from her talk. Aubrey is senior vice president of Applied AI Solutions at AWS, overseeing the company’s push into business applications for call centers, supply chains, and other sectors.
Continue reading for takeaways from the conversation, watch the video below, and listen to the conversation starting in the second segment of this week’s GeekWire Podcast.
The ‘teammate’ mental model changes everything. Aubrey draws a clear line between single-purpose AI tools that do one thing well and the agentic teammates she sees emerging — systems that take responsibility for whole objectives, and require a different kind of management.
“I think people will increasingly be managers of AI,” she said. “The days of having to do the individual keystrokes ourselves, I think, are fast fading. And in fact, everyone is going to be a manager now. You have to think about prioritization, delegation, and auditing. What’s the quality of our feedback, providing coaching. What are the guardrails?”
Amazon Connect crosses $1 billion. AWS’s call center platform reached $1 billion in annual revenue on a run rate basis, with Aubrey noting it has accelerated year-over-year growth for two consecutive years.
This week at re:Invent, the team announced 29 new capabilities across four areas: Nova Sonic voice interaction that Aubrey says is “very close to being indistinguishable” from human conversation; agents that complete tasks on behalf of customers; clickstream intelligence for product recommendations; and observability tools for inspecting AI reasoning.
One interesting detail: Aubrey said she’s often surprised by Nova Sonic’s sophistication and empathy in complex conversations — and equally surprised when it fails at basic tasks like spelling an address correctly.
“There’s still work to do to really polish that,” she said.
The ROI question gets a “yes and no.” Asked whether companies are seeing the business value to justify AI agent investments, Aubrey offered a nuanced response. “I observe companies to struggle to realize the business impact,” she said. But she said the value often shows up as eliminating bottlenecks — clearing backlogs, erasing technical debt, accelerating security patching — rather than immediate revenue gains.
“I’m not going to see the impact on my P&L today,” she said, “but if I fast forward a year, I’m going to have a product in market where real customers are using and getting real value, and we’re learning and iterating where I might not have even been halfway there in the past.”
Her advice for companies still hesitating: “If you don’t start today, that’s a one way door decision… I think you have to start the journey today. I would suggest people get focused, they get moving, because if you don’t, I think that becomes existential.”
Trust requires observability. Aubrey says companies won’t get full value from AI teammates if they can’t see how they’re reasoning.
“If you don’t trust an AI teammate, then you’re never going to realize the full benefit,” she said. “You’re not going to give them the hard tasks, you’re not going to invest in their development.”
The solution is treating AI inspection the same way you’d manage a human colleague: understand why it took an action, audit the quality, and iterate.
“You can refine your knowledge bases. You can refine your workflows. You can refine your guardrails, and then confidently keep iterating… the same way we do with each other. We keep iterating, we keep learning, and we keep getting better,” she said.
Product updates: Beyond Connect, Aubrey offered updates on other parts of her portfolio of Amazon’s applied AI solutions.
- Just Walk Out, Amazon’s cashierless checkout technology, deployed more than 150 new stores in 2025 and should accelerate next year.
- AWS Supply Chain, meanwhile, is getting a reset. “I’m going to declare that a pivot,” she said, with a Q1 announcement coming around agentic decision-making for supply and demand planning.
- Also coming in Q1: a life sciences product focused on antibody discovery, currently in beta.
She teased “a few other new investment areas” expected to come in early 2026.
