LAS VEGAS – Speaking on the Amazon Web Services Re:Invent stage this week, AWS executives Colin Aubrey provided a prediction that doubled as a wake-up call for companies thinking of AI as just another tool.
“I believe that in the next few years, agentic teammates will be essential to every team — just like the people sitting next to you,” Aubrey said during Wednesday’s keynote. “They will fundamentally transform how companies create and deliver for their customers.”
But what does that practice look like? In his own team, for example, he challenged groups where 50 people once took nine months to deliver a new product, and 10 people worked for three months.
Meanwhile, non-engineers like finance analysts are creating working prototypes using AI tools, contributing code to Amazon’s Kiro agentic development tool alongside engineers, and feeding those prototypes into Amazon’s famous PR/FAQ planning process on a weekly basis.
Those are some of the details Aubrey shared when we sat down with him after the keynote at Re’s GeekWire studio booth to dig into themes from his talk. Aubrey is Senior Vice President of Applied AI Solutions at AWS, overseeing the company’s push into business applications for the call center, supply chain and other sectors.
Continue reading for takeaways from the conversation, watch the video below, and listen to the conversation begin in the second episode of this week’s GeekWire podcast.
The ‘teammate’ mental model changes everything. Aubrey draws a clear line between single-purpose AI tools that do one thing well and the agentic counterparts he sees emerging—systems that take over entire purposes and require a different kind of management.
“I think humans will increasingly be the managers of AI,” he said. I think the days of giving ourselves personal keystrokes are fading fast. And really, everybody’s going to be a manager now. You have to think about prioritization, delegation and auditing. What is the quality of our feedback, coaching delivery. What are the fences?”
Amazon Connect surpasses $1 billion. AWS’s call center platform reached $1 billion in annual revenue based on run rate, Aubrey noted, as it accelerated year-over-year growth for two years in a row.
AI goes from tool to teammate
This week at re:Invent, the team announced 29 new capabilities across four areas: Nova Sonic voice interaction that Aubrey says is “very close to being indistinguishable” from human conversation; Agents who complete tasks on behalf of customers; Clickstream Intelligence for product recommendations; and observability tools for inspecting AI logic.
An interesting detail: Aubrey says he’s often surprised by Nova Sonic’s sophistication and empathy in complex conversations — and equally surprised when it fails at basic tasks like correctly spelling addresses.
“There’s still work to be done to really polish it,” he said.
ROI questions get a “yes and no” answer. Asked if companies are seeing business value to justify AI agent investments, Aubrey offered a succinct response. “I observe organizations struggling to realize business impact,” he said. But he said the value often shows up as eliminating bottlenecks — clearing backlogs, erasing technical debt, speeding up security patching — rather than immediate revenue gains.
I’m not going to see the impact on my P&L today,” he said, “but if I fast-forward a year, I’m going to have a product in the market where real customers are using and getting real value, and we’re learning and iterating where I wasn’t even halfway in the past.
His advice for companies is still ambivalent: “If you don’t start today, it’s a one-way decision… I think you have to start the journey today. I would advise people to focus, they move, because if you don’t, I think it becomes existential.”
Belief requires observability. Aubrey says companies won’t get full value from AI teammates if they can’t see how they’re reasoning.
“If you don’t trust an AI teammate, you’ll never realize the full benefits,” he said. “You’re not going to give them hard work, you’re not going to invest in their development.”
The solution is to use AI inspection the same way you would handle a human colleague: understand why it took a step, audit quality, and repeat.
“You can refine your knowledge bases. You can refine your workflow. You can refine your guards, and then iterate with confidence… the same way we do with each other. We keep iterating, we keep learning and we keep getting better,” she said.
Product Update: Beyond Connect, Aubrey offered updates on other parts of Amazon’s portfolio of applied AI solutions.
- Just Walk Out, Amazon’s cashierless checkout technology, has set up more than 150 new stores in 2025 and should accelerate next year.
- The AWS supply chain, meanwhile, is undergoing a reset. “I’m going to announce it’s a pivot,” he said, with a Q1 announcement around agentic decision-making for supply and demand planning.
- Also coming is Q1: a life science product focused on antibody discovery, currently in beta.
He teased “some other new investment areas” expected to arrive in early 2026.