Running AI Agents at Amazon Scale: Swami Sivasubramanian on Staying On the Loop, Not in It

Swami Sivasubramanian is VP, Agentic AI & Emerging Technologies, AWS. He joined Amazon as an intern during his PhD, worked on Dynamo, and went on to launch DynamoDB, SageMaker, and Bedrock; his organization now builds Kiro, Bedrock AgentCore, Quick Suite, and AWS Transform.

Swami joins Brad Porter for a candid conversation about the gap between AI assistants and AI agents, what it means to be on the loop rather than in it, and how Amazon rewired the way it works: one agent for a company-wide Java upgrade, a demo in a week before the PR/FAQ, and no more version 30 of a doc.

The conversation ultimately points toward a future where the models are no longer the constraint and the organization is: the teams that pull ahead stay on the loop, decide in days instead of months, and put deterministic guardrails around probabilistic agents.