Summary Bullets:
- Spring/summer platform conferences led with AI agent news and strategies
- AI agents represent the leading innovation of app modernization, but DevOps should be wary of over-promising
During this season of cloud platform conferences, rivals are vying to own the headlines and do battle in the cloud wars through their latest campaigns and strategies involving AI agents.
2024’s spring/summer conferences led with GenAI innovations–2025’s with agentic AI. AI assistants and copilots have transformed into tools used to create customized agents, unleashing claims of new capabilities for streamlining integrations with workflows, speeding the application development lifecycle, 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 the AI agents 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 AI agent 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 with 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, an 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 optimized 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.
Cloud platform providers are 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.
Recent vendor announcements are aiming to strike a chord among over-taxed enterprise IT operations teams, with claims of easing operational provisioning complexities involved with moving modern apps into production. Use cases supporting these claims remain scarce, and details to help prove new streamlined and low-code methods, particular around AI agent 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.