AWS announces new capabilities for its AI agent builder | TechCrunch

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is bulking up its AI agent platform, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, to make building and monitoring AI agents easier for enterprises.

AWS announced multiple new AgentCore features on Tuesday during the company’s annual AWS re:Invent conference. The company announced new tools for managing AI agent boundaries, agent memory capabilities, and agent evaluation features.

One upgrade is the introduction of Policy in AgentCore. This feature allows users to set boundaries for agent interactions using natural language. These boundaries integrate with AgentCore Gateway, which connects AI agents with outside tools, to automatically check each agent’s action and stop those that violate written controls.

Policy allows developers to set access controls to certain internal data or third-party applications like Salesforce or Slack. These boundaries can also include telling an AI agent they can automatically issue refunds up to $100 but must bring a human in the loop for anything larger, David Richardson, vice president of AgentCore, told TechCrunch.

The company also announced AgentCore Evaluations, which is a suite of 13 pre-built evaluation systems for AI agents that monitor factors including correctness, safety, and tool selection accuracy, among others. This also allows developers to have a head start in building their own evaluation features as well.

“That one is really going to help address the biggest fears that people have [with] deploying agents,” Richardson said about the new evaluation capabilities. “[It’s] a thing that a lot of people want to have but is tedious to build.”

AWS also announced that it’s building a memory capability into the agent platform, AgentCore Memory. This feature allows agents to develop a log of information on users over time, like their flight time or hotel preferences, and use that information to inform future decisions.

“Across these three things, we are continuing to iterate at the different layers at AgentCore,” Richardson said. “Talking to existing systems with Policy, [making agents] more powerful with [AgentCore Memory], helping the development team iterate with an agent.”

While agents are the soup du jour of the AI industry right now, some people believe the technology won’t last. But Richardson thinks that the tools AgentCore is developing can withstand the fast-moving market even as trends change — which he expects they will.

“Being able to take advantage of the reasoning capabilities of these models, which is coupled with being able to do real-world things through tools, feels like a sustainable pattern,” Richardson said. “The way that pattern works will definitely change. I think we feel ready for that.”

Follow along with all of TechCrunch’s coverage of the annual enterprise tech event here.