The opening mood: agents, automation, and safety
AWS re:Invent 2025 opened in Las Vegas on December 1 with one unmistakable theme: agentic AI moving from experiments to enterprise-grade production, paired with practical automation and a visible safety layer. Day-one updates spanned contact centers, payments, and even multicloud networking—underscoring AWS’s pitch that AI agents should be useful, governable, and ready to run at scale. AWS live updates.
AWS makes ‘agentic’ concrete
Bedrock AgentCore is now GA—and filling in the hard parts
AgentCore, the platform AWS built to run agents in production, reached general availability in October and now anchors much of the agentic story at re:Invent. The GA adds VPC/PrivateLink support, CloudFormation, tagging, and deeper observability—plus an Agent‑to‑Agent (A2A) protocol and Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectivity so agents can use tools safely behind enterprise identity. It’s available in nine regions. AWS What’s New.
Third‑party ecosystems are already latching on: Dynatrace announced a GA integration to trace and audit agent workflows, signaling that “observability for agents” will be table stakes. Dynatrace press.
Amazon Connect goes agentic—with voice that sounds natural
Amazon Connect, AWS’s cloud contact center, introduced “agentic self‑service” and an AI teammate that not only suggests next steps to human reps but also completes tasks (filling forms, filing requests) during the call. Connect also adds full agent observability to show what the AI understood, which tools it invoked, and why. It supports the Nova Sonic speech model for more natural conversations and now works with third‑party ASR/TTS partners like Deepgram and ElevenLabs. AWS live updates, Forbes.
One reference customer: Lyft built an intent agent on Bedrock and reports an 87% cut in average support resolution time, with over half of cases resolved in under three minutes. AWS live updates.
If you’ve been evaluating voice agents, Nova Sonic is worth a look: it’s a unified speech‑to‑speech foundation model with bidirectional streaming, designed for low‑latency, natural turn‑taking across multiple languages. What’s New, Nova Sonic docs.
Automation meets payments and multicloud
Visa + AWS: blueprints for agentic commerce
Visa and AWS are collaborating on “agentic payments,” publishing open blueprints on the Bedrock AgentCore repo so developers can let agents shop, compare, and transact with policy‑based limits and audit trails—while tapping Visa’s global network. Launch partners include Expedia, Intuit, lastminute.com and Eurostars. AWS live updates, PYMNTS.
AWS + Google Cloud: multicloud connectivity in minutes
In a rare cross‑cloud move, AWS announced the preview of AWS Interconnect – multicloud, jointly engineered with Google Cloud’s Cross‑Cloud Interconnect. Customers can now provision private, dedicated bandwidth links between AWS and Google Cloud from their console—cutting setup from weeks to minutes, with 1 Gbps in preview and scale to 100 Gbps at GA. A new open interoperability spec is available for other providers to adopt. AWS What’s New, Google Cloud blog, Reuters.
TipWhy this matters for builders
- Simpler DR/HA across clouds with private, dedicated bandwidth.
- Lower friction to split AI workloads (e.g., training on one provider, serving or data processing on another).
- Open spec plus GitHub API package suggests broader multicloud support is likely to follow. AWS What’s New, Google Cloud blog.
Safety and governance are now product features
AWS is layering safety into the runtime, not just documentation.
- Bedrock Guardrails has steadily expanded from content filters and denied topics to IAM policy‑enforced guardrails, detect‑mode previews, and multimodal toxicity checks—plus support for applying guardrails to third‑party models via API. AWS What’s New – IAM enforcement, What’s New – new capabilities, AWS blog.
- AWS’s responsible AI push at re:Invent 2024 included ISO/IEC 42001 certification coverage for key AI services, AI Service Cards for transparency, and first‑party “Automated Reasoning” checks to reduce factual errors—elements that carry forward into 2025’s agentic story. AWS AI blog.
- Nova models include watermarking and C2PA support (for images) and responsible‑use controls—signals that provenance and content safety are becoming defaults. AWS AI blog, The Verge.
- AWS also published a Responsible AI Policy with explicit prohibitions (e.g., impersonation, disinformation), clarifying what’s out of bounds for AI services. AWS Responsible AI Policy.
Concrete protection numbers from AWS’s documentation:
Pair that with the new observability layers in AgentCore and Amazon Connect, and the through‑line is clear: enterprises want agents that are auditable, measurable, and policy‑compliant.
What to watch next
- Executive keynotes run December 2–5, with AWS CEO Matt Garman opening Tuesday and agentic AI expected across sessions (600+ by AWS’s count). “5 things to know”.
- More MCP integrations and agent blueprints are likely as the partner ecosystem races to productize “agent ops.” About Amazon – Agentic AI innovations.
Opening announcements at re:Invent 2025 (Day 1)
| Announcement | What it is | Why it matters | Availability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Connect agentic self‑service and AI teammate | Reasoning agents that act during calls/chats; full agent observability; Nova Sonic voice; support for Deepgram and ElevenLabs | Moves contact centers from scripted flows to autonomous task completion with audit trails | Rolling out; details via AWS live updates |
| Bedrock AgentCore (GA) | Production runtime, memory, identity, gateway, code interpreter, browser, observability; A2A protocol; MCP support | Enterprise‑grade agent platform with security and ops controls | GA in nine regions |
| Visa + AWS agentic commerce | Blueprints and integrations to let AI agents transact with policy controls | Trust layer for autonomous shopping/travel/settlement | Announced; blueprints to Bedrock AgentCore repo |
| AWS Interconnect – multicloud (with Google) | Managed private links between AWS and Google Cloud; open spec | Cuts setup to minutes; supports DR/HA and cross‑cloud AI workflows | Preview (five regions); 1 Gbps preview, up to 100 Gbps at GA |
Sources
- AWS re:Invent 2025 live updates (agentic Connect, Visa collaboration, Interconnect preview, customer references): About Amazon
- AWS Interconnect – multicloud preview: AWS What’s New; joint posts and context: Google Cloud blog, Google Cloud networking post, and coverage by Reuters
- AgentCore GA details and ecosystem: AWS What’s New, Dynatrace press
- Amazon Connect agentic capabilities: About Amazon; additional analysis: Forbes
- Nova Sonic: AWS What’s New, Docs
- Safety stack and responsible AI: AWS AI blog – advancing AI trust; Guardrails IAM enforcement, Guardrails updates, Guardrails blog, AWS Responsible AI Policy, The Verge – Nova models & watermarking
