The cloud platform spring/summer conference season is coming to a close, and over the course of a year the hot topic transitioned from generative AI (GenAI) to agentic AI.
Vendor messaging revolved heavily on appealing to enterprise DevOps teams’ greatest pain-point—the ongoing struggle to move modern applications into production across highly distributed environments. All vendors made the same promise—new AI agent tools and frameworks will streamline the entire application lifecycle for developers and IT ops members alike.
AI assistants and copilots have transformed into tools used to create customised agents, unleashing claims of new capabilities which ease integrations with workflows, speeding application design/development, and supporting multi-agent orchestration and management. Vendors are making bold promises based on agentic AI for its ability to eliminate a multitude of tasks mandated by humans and taking workflow automations to new heights.
AI agents, which can autonomously complete tasks on behalf of users leveraging data from sources external to the AI model, are accelerating the transition towards a more disruptive phase of GenAI. Enhanced memory capabilities enable agentic AI to develop a greater sense of context, including the capacity for “planning.” Agents can connect to other systems through APIs, taking actions rather than just returning information or generating content.
Recap of the latest agentic AI events:
- Amazon announced Bedrock AgentCore, a set of DevOps tools and services to help developers design custom applications while easing the deployment and operation of enterprise-grade AI agents. The tools are complemented by new observability features found in AWS CloudWatch.
- Joining the Google Gemini family of products, including Gemini 2.5 and Pro, Vertex AI Agent, ADK, and Agentspace, is Google Veo 3, a GenAI model providing more accessibility to high quality video production.
- OpenAI released ChatGPT agent, a new AI system infused with agentic capabilities, that can operate a computer, browse the web, write code, use a terminal, write reports, create images, edit spreadsheets, and create slides for users
- Anthropic released Claude Code, which uses agentic search to understand an entire codebase without manual context selection and is optimised for code understanding and generation with Claude Opus 4.
- IBM announced watsonx Orchestrate AI Agent, a suite of agent capabilities that include development tools to build agents on any framework, pre-built agents, and integration with platform partners including Oracle, AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce.
Agentic AI strategies
Cloud platform providers are all strategically highlighting their most salient strengths. These range from the breadth of their cloud stack offerings to mature serverless computing solutions to access to massive developer communities via popular Copilot tools and Marketplaces. Yet all are focused on gaining mind share amidst heated campaigns of not only traditional platform rivals, but an increasingly crowded ecosystem of new platform and digital services providers (in the form of infrastructure providers) vying to catch the enterprise developer’s attention.
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By GlobalDataRecent vendor announcements are aiming to strike a chord among over-taxed enterprise IT operations teams, with claims of easing operational provisioning involved in digital transformations. Use cases supporting these claims remain scarce, and details to help prove new streamlined and low-code methods, particular around agentic AI orchestration, are still vague in some cases. Enterprises should remain vigilant in seeking out technology partners providing a deep understanding of an evolving technology which comes with a lot of promises.
