Netomi raises $110 million as Accenture and Adobe bet on AI for customer service

Netomi, the San Francisco-based startup building AI systems for enterprise customer service, said Thursday that it has raised $110 million in new funding in a round led by Accenture Ventures, with participation from Adobe Ventures, WndrCo, Silver Lake Waterman, NAVER Ventures, Metis Strategy and Fin Capital. Jeffrey Katzenberg, managing partner of WndrCo and co-founder of DreamWorks, has joined the company’s board. The round builds on early backing from a roster of AI luminaries that includes OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman.

On its face, the financing is another large AI round in a market still awash in capital. But the deal is more revealing than that. It suggests that a new line is being drawn inside enterprise AI — not between companies that have a chatbot and companies that do not, but between companies that can show AI works in the messy, brittle, heavily governed environments where large businesses actually operate, and those that still mostly shine in demos.

The market around Netomi makes the stakes clear. Sierra, the AI agent startup led by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, raised $350 million at a $10 billion valuation in September 2025 and has since made three acquisitions in 2026 alone. Decagon tripled its valuation to $4.5 billion in January 2026 with a $250 million Series D. Salesforce, ServiceNow and Intercom are all racing to embed AI agents into their existing platforms; Intercom’s Fin AI agent reportedly crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue at $0.99 per resolution. Gartner predicts that 40 percent of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5 percent in 2025.

Against that backdrop, Netomi’s $110 million round is not the largest in the category, but it may be the most strategically constructed. The combination of Accenture’s enterprise consulting network, Adobe’s dominance in digital experience management and Netomi’s track record in production deployments represents a coordinated play to embed AI not as a chatbot layer on top of websites, but as the fundamental intelligence governing how entire digital experiences behave.

The company did not disclose its valuation, and in an interview tied to the announcement, Netomi executives declined to provide revenue or profitability figures. Instead, Chief Executive Puneet Mehta pointed to customer economics, saying a typical large deployment can generate at least tens of millions of dollars in impact, with some customers on a path to hundreds of millions.

For technical decision-makers, though, the more important part of Thursday’s news may be the partnerships attached to the money.

Why Accenture and Adobe turned a venture deal into a global distribution play

The structure of the deal reads like a map of how enterprise AI gets bought in 2026.

Alongside the investment, Accenture has entered a global alliance with Netomi to bring the platform to its Fortune 100 client base worldwide. The alliance will involve hundreds of Accenture team members receiving training on Netomi’s platform — a meaningful commitment from the world’s largest consulting firm and a distribution channel that few AI startups can match. Adobe Ventures’ participation comes with plans to integrate Netomi into Adobe’s Brand Concierge agentic ecosystem, giving Netomi a path into the software layer many large brands already use to manage websites, content and digital journeys. Metis Strategy brings access to CIO advisory channels. Ndidi Oteh, CEO of Accenture Song, said in the press release that the partnership is designed to help clients “reinvent how they serve their customers — seamlessly, responsibly and at scale.”

The result is not just more cash. It is a distribution network wrapped around a thesis.

Justin Wexler, a partner at WndrCo who led the firm’s Series B investment in Netomi in 2021, said most companies in the customer experience space are simply swapping a human for an AI. “That’s the extent of what they’re building,” Wexler said. “What we’re doing at Netomi, particularly with the Adobe partnership, is leapfrogging that altogether — merging the two layers. You don’t have a ‘How can I help you?’ chatbot. This is anticipating the issue and eliminating the ticket altogether.”

The distinction matters because it describes a fundamentally different kind of product. Most customer service AI still sits downstream. A customer encounters a problem, opens a chat window, explains the issue and waits for a response. Even when AI speeds up that exchange, the friction has already happened. Netomi wants to move upstream, into the experience before the ticket exists.

Mehta described the idea in blunt economic terms. “Why are there so many customer service tickets? Why is $500 billion spent on human labor answering customer service phone calls, emails and chats?” he asked. “What we realized is that the world’s largest companies wait for a problem to happen and then jump on it to solve it — but by that time, they’ve already created a lot of frustration, and it’s very expensive to do that.”

The answer, in Mehta’s view, is not to make downstream customer service faster with AI. It is to prevent the service ticket from being created in the first place. That logic sits behind almost every strategic decision the company has made — including the Adobe partnership.

“Most important websites run on Adobe Experience Manager,” Mehta said. “So we’re saying, what if we bring that kind of context and awareness upstream — capturing that a customer might be affected before it even turns into a customer service ticket.”

The Wall Street trading floor origins behind Netomi’s AI architecture

To understand what Netomi is building, you have to understand where its founder came from.

Mehta, who spent his early career constructing automated trading engines on Wall Street, told VentureBeat that the founding thesis was deceptively simple. “When we started Netomi, the core thesis was that AI is going to become the new customer interface,” he said. “The Transformers [paper] did not exist, so we had literally stitched together a set of different models to create the same end result.”

That background in low-latency finance is not incidental. It is the intellectual architecture that undergirds everything Netomi builds. When asked what connects trading systems to customer experience platforms, Mehta drew a direct line.

“If you think about the low-latency trading world, that was the first technology application to use situational awareness and a variety of different signals at scale,” he said. “There was not one signal that it was making decisions on. You needed market data feeds. You needed situational awareness. You needed news. You needed awareness of your own book of business. You needed your own risk assessment.”

That multi-signal architecture, Mehta argued, translates directly to what enterprise customer experience demands. Rather than waiting passively for a customer to describe a problem — the way traditional chatbots and even most current AI agents operate — Netomi’s system attempts to reconstruct the full situation before it acts. The request itself is only part of the story.

“What the customer tells you is very important, but the situation the customer is in is sometimes even more important,” Mehta said. “What if we borrowed that design pattern we built for low-latency trading? Because we can probably know why the customer is calling us. And if we can know that, we could maybe even reach out to them before they reach out to us and solve the problem.”

He summarized the philosophical distinction this way: “What large language models by themselves did was they essentially democratized just raw intelligence. We are democratizing context, and that changes everything.”

That is a sharp line, and also a revealing one. Netomi is effectively betting that the defensible layer in enterprise AI will not be the foundation model alone. It will be the orchestration layer that turns general model capability into governed, auditable, domain-specific action.

That governed approach extends to how the platform handles risk. Netomi uses what it calls an AI authority matrix — a real-time system that defines what the AI can do autonomously and when it must escalate to a human. “It’s a little bit like autonomous driving,” Mehta said. The AI knows when it’s approaching a boundary and pulls a human in. For regulated industries, specific endpoints can be locked to deterministic, rules-based flows while the agentic layer handles broader orchestration — and all of it is version-controlled and traceable, with metadata saved for seven years.

Inside the AI system that rearranges websites and retail stores in real time

The most technically ambitious element of Netomi’s vision — and the one that most sharply distinguishes it from competitors — is what the company calls AI-embedded customer experience orchestration. Rather than placing a chatbot in the corner of a website, Netomi’s system can rearrange the website itself based on what the AI infers about each individual customer’s situation.

Wexler demonstrated a live example during the interview. “As we see most deployments, companies that want to deploy AI on their websites, they throw a chatbot on the corner,” he said. “If you embed agentic capabilities into the digital layer itself — and again, Adobe Experience Manager is the leading digital layer of enterprise — then you could do really unique things.”

Wexler described what this looks like in practice. In a typical deployment, he said, the AI doesn’t just answer questions — it reshapes the page. Based on a customer’s browsing behavior, purchase history and inferred intent, the system can reorganize a product page in real time: surfacing warnings one customer needs but another doesn’t, prompting a sample order at the moment of hesitation, or flagging a compatibility issue before checkout. Two customers looking at the same product might see fundamentally different pages — not because a marketing team built two versions, but because the AI is composing the experience on the fly.

“The AI is playing the role of arranging the elements of the website to cater to me and my needs,” Wexler said. “It’s anticipating my needs.”

The implication is a shift from static web pages to something closer to generative websites — pages that reconstruct themselves around each visitor the way a good salesperson adjusts a pitch mid-conversation. It is a fundamentally different model from bolting a chat widget onto a page that otherwise looks the same for everyone.

“The AI is playing the role of arranging the elements of the website to cater to me and my needs,” Wexler said. “It’s anticipating my needs.”

That vision already extends beyond screens. Mehta revealed that Coach, the handbag company owned by Tapestry, deployed Netomi’s platform in a physical flagship store during the holiday season to help customers navigate the retail space and is now rolling it out chainwide.

The numbers Netomi is putting behind its production claims are equally ambitious. At DraftKings, the company said its platform can handle traffic surging to more than 40,000 concurrent customer requests per second during major sporting events, while delivering sub-three-second response times and 98 percent intent classification accuracy. At Paramount, the company said it deployed across chat and voice in two weeks and then scaled through a weekend that included a major UFC event and the AFC Championship.

Those are company-reported numbers, and they are hard to benchmark against competitors because the industry lacks standard public reporting. But they illustrate the kind of problem Netomi wants buyers to think about. At that scale, an AI support product stops looking like a smarter FAQ bot and starts looking like a distributed systems challenge. You are not just asking whether a model can answer a question. You are asking whether an entire system can make decisions quickly, safely and consistently while traffic spikes and business rules collide.

The $110 million question: can invisible AI beat the chatbot industrial complex?

Whether Netomi can deliver on the full scope of its ambition — transforming from an AI customer service platform into an ambient intelligence layer that reshapes digital and physical experiences in real time — remains an open question. The company faces competitors with far larger war chests, deeper platform footprints and, in Sierra’s case, a founder-level relationship with OpenAI.

But Netomi’s bet is fundamentally different from what much of the field is building. While Sierra and Decagon race to replace human agents with AI concierges, measuring success in conversations handled, Netomi is wagering that the highest form of customer service is the interaction that never needs to happen at all.

“There are new startups trying to convince enterprises that if every customer gets a ‘concierge,’ if there’s ‘an agent for every moment,’ then loyalty follows,” Mehta said. “But most relationships with brands are functional. Customers don’t want a conversational relationship with their airline or their bank. They want things to work — seamlessly, invisibly, without friction.”

In his closing comments during the interview, Mehta warned that many companies still underestimate the operational risk of deploying immature AI into sensitive customer environments. “What large companies adopting AI don’t fully realize yet is what kind of risk are they taking by adopting those platforms that are not really field tested for this kind of scale and situations,” he said.

That may be the most important line in the whole announcement. Because beneath the funding round, beneath the partner logos and beneath the talk of agents and orchestration, the real question in enterprise AI remains old-fashioned: which systems can be trusted when the environment gets ugly?

“We have built this technology more like how automated trading got built, or how autonomous driving got built, compared to coming at this from just a customer service lens,” Mehta said.

It is a fitting frame for a company whose founder left Wall Street to fix customer service. On the trading floor, the best systems were never the ones that made the most trades. They were the ones that knew, with precision, when not to act — and the ones nobody noticed until something went wrong and they held. Netomi’s new investors are betting $110 million that the same principle applies when the person on the other end of the system is not a trader, but a customer who just wants their floor not to leak.

Amazon’s OpenAI gambit signals a new phase in the cloud wars — one where exclusivity no longer applies

Amazon Web Services on Tuesday launched one of the most consequential enterprise AI plays in the company’s 20-year history, simultaneously bringing OpenAI’s most powerful models to its Bedrock platform, unveiling a new agentic developer framework, releasing a desktop AI productivity tool called Amazon Quick, and expanding its Amazon Connect service from a single contact-center product into a family of four agentic AI solutions targeting supply chains, hiring, healthcare, and customer experience.

The announcements, made at a live event in San Francisco titled “What’s Next with AWS,” landed just 24 hours after OpenAI and Microsoft publicly restructured their exclusive cloud partnership — a move that, for the first time, freed OpenAI to distribute all of its products across rival cloud providers. AWS CEO Matt Garman called it “a huge partnership” and said customers have been asking for OpenAI models inside AWS “from the very early days.”

The timing was no accident. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had flagged the Microsoft-OpenAI restructuring as “very interesting” in a post on X the day prior, promising more details on Tuesday. What followed was a sweeping set of launches that together represent AWS’s bid to become the definitive infrastructure layer for the agentic AI era — one where intelligent software agents don’t just answer questions but take autonomous action inside enterprise workflows.

OpenAI’s most capable models arrive on Amazon Bedrock for the first time, reshaping the cloud AI marketplace

The centerpiece announcement: OpenAI’s latest models are now available through Amazon Bedrock in limited preview, with general availability expected within weeks. AWS confirmed that GPT-5.4 is available immediately in limited preview, with GPT-5.5 arriving shortly thereafter.

In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat at the event, Anthony Liguori, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at AWS, described the significance of the moment. “We announced a partnership about eight weeks ago centered around this idea of the stateful runtime environment, the SRE APIs,” Liguori said. “However, today we announced the availability of all of OpenAI’s frontier models in Amazon Bedrock available via both the stateless APIs — these are the APIs that are commonly used, like chat completions and responses.”

Liguori characterized the stateless API availability as particularly critical because it removes migration friction. “Customers can take their existing workloads today and just start using AWS right off the bat,” he said. “They don’t have to write any new software, develop any new things. I think that’s one of the most exciting announcements that came out today.”

The integration means AWS customers can now evaluate and deploy OpenAI models alongside offerings from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Cohere, and Amazon’s own models — all through Bedrock’s unified security, governance, and cost controls. For enterprise procurement teams, this collapses what had been a fragmented multi-vendor landscape into a single pane of glass.

How a $50 billion Amazon investment and a messy Microsoft breakup cleared the way for Tuesday’s deal

The path to Tuesday’s announcement was anything but smooth. As TechCrunch reported, OpenAI’s earlier $50 billion deal with Amazon, announced in February, had created a legal tangle with Microsoft. Under the original Microsoft-OpenAI agreement, Microsoft retained exclusive rights to OpenAI products accessed through APIs, which appeared to conflict directly with OpenAI’s promise to give AWS exclusive hosting rights for its new Frontier agent-building tool.

Microsoft had publicly pushed back at the time, stating that “Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider of stateless OpenAI APIs.” The Financial Times reported that Microsoft even contemplated legal action. Monday’s restructured deal — which replaced Microsoft’s open-ended exclusivity with a nonexclusive license running through 2032 — swept those legal obstacles aside.

For AWS, the resolution means its multi-billion-dollar investment in OpenAI can now fully bear fruit. As CNBC reported, OpenAI’s revenue chief Denise Dresser had told employees in a memo that the Microsoft relationship “has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are — for many that’s Bedrock.” At the San Francisco event, Dresser framed the moment as a turning point. “They’re no longer in the mindset of experimentation and pilots,” she said of enterprise customers. “They really want to go full enterprise wide, and they understand that to do that, they need to have powerful models. But even more importantly, they want those models in a trusted environment.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who was unable to attend in person due to his ongoing court case against Elon Musk across the Bay Bridge in Oakland, sent a recorded video message. “We are co-developing an agent platform from the ground up, deeply integrated with AWS services and powered by OpenAI’s most advanced models and tools,” Altman said, “so that customers can build and run powerful agents in their own environment without worrying about the underlying plumbing.”

Inside Bedrock managed agents, the reinforcement learning-trained ‘harness’ that AWS says will define the agentic era

Beyond raw model access, AWS launched Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI — a system that combines OpenAI’s frontier models with its proprietary “harness,” the agentic execution framework that powers products like Codex. This is where Liguori’s technical analysis was most revealing.

He explained that the harness concept represents a shift in how models are trained and deployed for agentic work. “When you think about an agentic platform, there’s really two components,” Liguori told VentureBeat. “One is the harness — the actual logic that will execute tool calls for the model, determine when to compact the context, all of those sorts of things — and then the model itself.”

Critically, Liguori argued, the best agentic performance comes when models are trained specifically against their harness through reinforcement learning — not merely prompted to use tools at inference time. “You can give a model a whole lot of instructions and a set of tools, and it will be able to use it most of the time,” he said. “But when you really train the model on a specific set of tools, a specific style of operations, it’s just like drilling plays over and over again — the model builds muscle memory for using that harness.”

The football analogy is instructive. Where general-purpose models are like versatile athletes who can adapt to any playbook, harness-trained models are like championship teams that have run the same formations thousands of times until execution becomes instinctive. For enterprises deploying agents in high-stakes production environments — managing financial transactions, orchestrating supply chains, or processing sensitive healthcare data — that reliability gap matters enormously.

Bedrock Managed Agents consists of three components: a runtime layer for configuring skills, memory policies, and tool access; an environment layer where the agent lives (deployable on Fargate or other AWS compute); and an inference API for interacting with the agent. The system integrates deeply with AWS’s identity and access management, VPC networking, and CloudTrail auditing — meaning every action an agent takes is logged and governed by existing enterprise security policies.

AWS makes its boldest security claim yet: zero human access to inference machines running OpenAI’s models

Liguori made what may be his most striking claim when discussing why enterprises should trust AWS over on-premises alternatives or smaller cloud providers. “With Bedrock, the system that we’re using to host the GPT-5.4 models, that whole environment is zero operator access,” he told VentureBeat. “There’s no human that could ever log into one of those machines, so your inference data is never able to be accessed by a human.”

He pointed to AWS’s custom silicon — Graviton processors and Nitro security chips — as the foundation for this claim. “When you look at one of our servers, either compute servers or the servers we’re using for Gen AI, the only thing that you can buy off the shelf is the memory modules. Everything else is either custom boards or even custom silicon.”

This argument is designed to counter a growing narrative from what the industry calls “neo-clouds” — smaller providers that offer on-premises model hosting with tighter physical security controls. Liguori flipped that argument on its head: “You’re actually way more secure in the cloud because we have built a platform with such strong physical securities… If you were to try to stand up your own inference system today, you’d probably be running open source software on just Linux.”

It’s a bold claim, and one that enterprise CISOs will undoubtedly scrutinize. But it underscores AWS’s conviction that the agentic era — where AI agents access source code, PII data, and critical business systems — demands infrastructure security guarantees that go far beyond what most organizations can build independently.

Codex’s 4 million weekly users could soon multiply as OpenAI’s coding agent arrives on AWS

OpenAI’s Codex coding agent also arrived on Bedrock in limited preview. Dresser shared that Codex has been growing at a blistering pace, expanding “from 3 million weekly active users to 4 million in two weeks.” The tool has evolved beyond simple code generation into a full agentic software development lifecycle platform.

For Liguori, who described himself as “10 to 20 times more productive” as an engineer thanks to tools like Codex, bringing this capability into AWS represents the bridge between individual developer productivity and enterprise-scale deployment. “Most developers today are using these OpenAI models on their laptops,” he said. “We haven’t seen that happen yet in the rest of the industry, and with Bedrock Managed Agents, we think we have a way for enterprises to deploy agents in a means that meets their compliance requirements.”

The gap Liguori is describing — between the solo developer experience and enterprise-wide adoption — is arguably the central challenge of the current AI moment. Individual engineers can achieve extraordinary productivity gains with agentic coding tools. But scaling that to thousands of developers across a Fortune 500 company, with proper governance, security, and auditability, requires platform-level infrastructure. That’s the market AWS is targeting.

Liguori saw the near-term potential in even more immediate terms. He described leading a team of about 20 engineers who share a common codebase of skills and MCP tools. “That has been an amazingly powerful thing, because we’re all able to build on top of each other as we learn how to use these models,” he said. “Where I’ve run into a hurdle is there’s a lot of stuff I’d like to share with our finance team… and I can’t really ask them to clone a Git repo and build it from a Git repo.” Bedrock Managed Agents, he argued, will let teams create hosted agents that non-technical colleagues can access — taking agentic development from a developer-only practice to an enterprise-wide capability within the next six months.

Amazon Quick Desktop aims to be the agentic AI assistant that finally works for non-developers

While the OpenAI partnership dominated headlines, AWS also launched Amazon Quick Desktop — a new desktop application designed to bring agentic AI to knowledge workers who aren’t developers. Liguori framed the product as addressing a critical gap. “A lot of these agentic tools have primarily targeted developers,” he said. “Quick Desktop is a really great tool if you are a knowledge worker that is not a developer… I think it’s been underserved for the non-developer knowledge workers.”

Quick Desktop integrates with a user’s local files, calendar, email, Slack, and enterprise applications — building what AWS calls a “Knowledge Graph” that maps relationships between people, projects, decisions, and actions. The system connects natively with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoom, and Salesforce. Unlike other AI productivity tools, Quick doesn’t wait for prompts. It proactively surfaces what matters — unanswered emails, deals needing updates, documents awaiting review — and can take action like scheduling meetings, drafting emails, or updating Jira tickets.

Garman, who said he had been using the desktop app for several weeks, called it “by far the most effective tool” among AI productivity products he has tested. “If you think about what we’ve done with Quick — combine all of your sources of data inside of the enterprise — but then we also saw the power of having access to a local desktop and being able to operate with your local files and your local email and your local Slack… but people were worried about security, appropriately so,” Garman said. “What we’re doing here is combining a bunch of those things together with QUIC to give you the best of all of those worlds.”

The product is available in preview today, with no AWS account required — users can sign up with just an email address. Customers including BMW, 3M, Mondelēz, Southwest Airlines, and the NFL are already using it, with some reporting production time reductions of nearly 80% and customer issue processing cut by more than 50%.

Amazon Connect becomes a family of four as AWS bets that ‘agentic teammates’ will transform supply chains, hiring, and healthcare

Perhaps the most ambitious long-term bet announced Tuesday was the expansion of Amazon Connect from a single contact-center product — one that reached over $1 billion in revenue last year and processes 20 million interactions daily — into a family of four agentic AI solutions.

The new lineup includes Amazon Connect Decisions, an agentic supply chain planning tool built on more than 25 specialized supply chain tools and 30 years of Amazon operational science, including one of Amazon’s SCOT (Supply Chain Optimization Technologies) foundation models. Amazon Connect Talent is a high-volume hiring platform inspired by Amazon’s experience hiring 250,000 seasonal employees during peak periods, using AI agents to conduct voice interviews around the clock and present recruiters with anonymized, skills-based scoring. Amazon Connect Customer AI is the renamed and enhanced version of the original contact-center service. And Amazon Connect Health covers the patient journey from appointment scheduling through clinical encounters, including ambient documentation, billing code suggestions, and post-visit summaries drawn from Amazon’s experience with One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy.

Colleen Aubrey, who leads applied AI solutions at AWS and previously co-founded Amazon’s advertising business, introduced a new design philosophy underlying all four products: “humorphism.” Where skeuomorphism translated physical objects into digital metaphors — desks to desktops, files to folders — humorphism translates human interaction dynamics into AI agent behavior. “If we’re building products that at the heart of which is an agentic teammate, then how should those teammates interact with you?” Aubrey asked. The philosophy manifests in specific design choices: Connect Decisions agents ask planners why they made manual adjustments and apply those insights across similar products. Connect Talent agents adapt follow-up questions based on candidate responses. Connect Health agents trace every clinical insight back to source data so physicians can verify AI-generated documentation.

What AWS’s four-layer strategy reveals about where the real value in enterprise AI will be captured

Taken together, Tuesday’s announcements reveal a coherent strategy operating across four distinct layers: custom infrastructure (Graviton, Trainium, zero-operator-access security), model access (Bedrock as a model marketplace with unified APIs), an agentic platform (Bedrock Managed Agents and AgentCore for building and governing agents), and purpose-built applications (Quick for individual productivity, Connect for vertical business operations).

This layered approach addresses a fundamental tension in the enterprise AI market. Companies want choice at the model layer but integration at the platform layer and specificity at the application layer. By offering all three through a single security and governance framework, AWS is betting it can capture value across the entire stack — a strategy that reshapes competitive dynamics for Microsoft, Google Cloud, and the growing constellation of smaller AI infrastructure providers.

Garman pushed back on the “SaaSpocalypse” narrative that agentic AI will destroy incumbent enterprise software companies. “The incumbent providers today have such a huge advantage,” he said. “They have deep domain expertise… a large customer set with all of their data.” He pointed to Salesforce’s recent headless API offering as an example of incumbents adapting smartly. But he also drew an explicit parallel to the early days of cloud computing, when customers would simply replicate their on-premises data centers in the cloud rather than reimagine what was possible. “You see that today with how people are thinking about AI and agents,” Garman said. “They’re like, ‘I have this business process, I’m gonna have agents do the exact same thing that humans do.’ It kind of works… but it doesn’t give you that transformational change.”

He pointed to Amazon’s own Prime Video team as proof of what that change looks like in practice. The team used agentic tools to rebuild a partner payment system that was projected to take two years — completing it in roughly two quarters with a handful of people, while simultaneously improving the system for customers, for Amazon, and for the partners who get paid through it.

The enterprise AI arms race enters a new phase as model access becomes table stakes and the platform war begins

For enterprises evaluating their AI strategies, Tuesday’s announcements simplify one decision — OpenAI models are now available where most of them already run production workloads — while complicating another. With model access increasingly commoditized across cloud providers, the real differentiator becomes the platform layer: where agents are built, governed, deployed, and trusted to take consequential actions. That’s the battleground AWS is staking out, and it’s the same ground Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and a growing number of startups intend to contest.

Liguori sees the transformation accelerating fast. “I think what we’re going to see in the next six months is a lot of this agentic stuff going from developer only to being able to be consumed by a larger number of folks within an enterprise,” he told VentureBeat. Anthony Liguori, the AWS distinguished engineer who led the technical work over eight sleepless weeks to bring OpenAI’s models to Bedrock, said his own productivity as a software engineer has increased 10 to 20 times over the past year. When asked what excites him most about what comes next, he didn’t talk about models or infrastructure. He talked about what happens when that same multiplier reaches the finance team, the product managers, the supply chain planners — the millions of knowledge workers who have been watching the agentic revolution from the sidelines.

“We had nothing eight weeks ago,” he said, “and now we’re here.” If the next eight weeks move as fast, the sidelines may not exist for much longer.

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