Amazon Web Services announced four new AI models within its Nova model family and a frontier model service.

As we make our way to AWS re:Invent today in Las Vegas, these are some of the questions on our mind: Will Amazon CEO Andy Jassy make another appearance? Will this, in fact, be Amazon CTO Werner Vogels’ last big closing keynote at the event? Will we be able to line up early enough to score a seat inside the special Acquired podcast recording Thursday morning? 

And how many million enterprise AI billboards will we see between the airport and the Venetian?

But more to the point for Amazon, the company faces a critical test this week: showing that its heavy artificial intelligence investments can pay off as Microsoft and Google gain ground in AI and the cloud.

A year after the Seattle company unveiled its in-house Nova AI foundation models, the expansion into agentic AI will be the central theme as Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman takes the stage Tuesday morning for the opening keynote at the company’s annual cloud conference.

The stakes are big, for both the short and long term. AWS accounts for a fifth of Amazon’s sales and more than half of its profits in many quarters, and all the major cloud platforms are competing head-to-head in AI as the next big driver of growth.

With much of the tech world focused on the AI chip race, the conference will be closely watched across the industry for news of the latest advances in Amazon’s in-house Trainium AI chips. 

But even as the markets and outside observers focus on AI, we’ve learned from covering this event over the years that many AWS customers still care just as much or more about advances in the fundamental building blocks of storage, compute and database services.

Amazon gave a hint of its focus in early announcements from the conference:

• The company announced a wave of updates for Amazon Connect, its cloud-based contact center service, adding agents that can independently solve customer problems, beyond routing calls. Amazon Connect recently crossed $1 billion in annual revenue.
• In an evolution of the cloud competition, AWS announced a new multicloud networking product with Google Cloud, which lets customers set up private, high-speed connections between the rival platforms, with an open specification that other providers can adopt. 
• AWS Marketplace is adding AI-powered search and flexible pricing models to help customers piece together AI solutions from multiple vendors.

Beyond the product news, AWS is making a concerted effort to show that the AI boom isn’t just for the big platforms. In a pitch to consultants and integrators at the event, the company released new research from Omdia, commissioned by Amazon, claiming that partners can generate more than $7 in services revenue for every dollar of AWS technology sold.

Along with that research, AWS launched a new “Agentic AI” competency program for partners, designed to recognize firms building autonomous systems rather than simple chatbots.

Garman’s keynote begins at 8 a.m. PT Tuesday, with a dedicated agentic AI keynote from VP Swami Sivasubramanian on Wednesday, an infrastructure keynote on Thursday morning, and Vogels’ aforementioned potential swan song on Thursday afternoon. 

Stay tuned to GeekWire for coverage, assuming we make it to the Strip!