AWS Summit NYC 2025: Exploring the Latest Innovations in AWS Marketplace
Matt Yanchyshyn, vice president of AWS Marketplace and Partner Services at AWS, joins John Furrier of SiliconANGLE Media at the AWS Summit NYC 2025. The discussion centers on AWS's strategic placements in their marketplace, now featuring a dedicated category for artificial intelligence agents and tools, as announced at the event.
In this insightful session, Yanchyshyn explores the transformative potential of AI agents within AWS Marketplace. As the platform expands to include over 900 agent-specific products, Yanchyshyn highlights the evolution from traditional app stores to a dynamic ecosystem facilitating professional services, guardrails and advanced AI tools. Contributing to the session, theCUBE analysts explore AWS's strategic approach to equipping enterprises with cutting-edge technology for enhanced operational efficiency.
Key takeaways from the discussion emphasize the robust growth of AI agents and tools, a move expected to redefine software development and enterprise operations as stated by Yanchyshyn. The session also covers the importance of vendor-hosted application programming interfaces and novel protocols such as MCP and A2A, facilitating seamless integration and deployment. Insights from both Yanchyshyn and analysts present AWS's vision of a marketplace fostering innovation amid fast-paced technological advancements.
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Tom Godden, AWS | AWS Summit NYC 2025
In this AWS Mid-Year Leadership Summit interview, Rajiv Chopra, VP of Amazon Just Walk Out, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to unpack the evolution and impact of computer vision in retail. Chopra shares how AWS has transformed the breakthrough technology behind Amazon Go into a scalable, edge-powered solution for partners across stadiums, hospitals, universities and airports. With over 250 deployments outside of Amazon properties, Just Walk Out is redefining how consumers shop by enabling fast, frictionless experiences without checkout lines.
Chopra details key benefits for retailers, from revenue growth to shrink reduction, and illustrates use cases across venues like Lumen Field, UC San Diego and Hudson News. He breaks down the technological architecture behind the scenes, including deep learning models, custom edge compute devices and cloud integration, and explains how Just Walk Out balances accuracy, performance and customer experience. The conversation also highlights the broader trend of digital-physical convergence and visual reasoning as a frontier for applied AI.
Watch to learn how AWS is turning real-world environments into intelligent, automated spaces – and how Just Walk Out is leading the charge in reimagining retail through innovation.
In this AWS Summit NYC interview, Tom Godden, Director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to unpack how generative and agentic AI are reshaping the enterprise landscape. Godden, a former CIO, brings a practitioner’s perspective to the cultural and structural shifts enterprises face when adopting AI at scale. He explains how AWS is helping leaders navigate both the promise and friction of transformation through new infrastructure, marketplace tooling and a $100M investment in the Generative AI Innovation Center.
The conversati...Read more
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What is being discussed at the AWS Summit and who is a key speaker mentioned in the coverage?add
What is your perspective on centralization versus decentralization in the context of AI and organizational structure?add
What are the company's strategies and long-term vision regarding innovation and agentic AI?add
>> Welcome back, everyone, theCUBE here, coverage of AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Of course, we're here all week as part of the media week with theCUBE in our NYSE studio where we're broadcasting Cloud meets AI as generative AI changes the game, and all the access here. Everybody's in New York. Amazon has their annual event. It feels this year like a reinvent because of all the accelerated product announcements. Momentum, the marketplace is changing and has new features. The ecosystem's growing. Tom Godden's here, AWS Director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS. Obviously, the enterprise is the hottest area, although we are predicting a consumer trend coming right after. Tom, great to come and see you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on.>> Yeah, thanks for the introduction. We're super excited. It is, you can feel the energy here is palpable.>> I mean, doesn't it feel like a little mini reinvent? You got Swami up on stage. You're doing the three big announcements, huge news event.>> Huge.>> Nova with the customization, that's the Amazon model. You got AgentCore. AgentCore and Marketplace having a dedicated section to AI and tooling. Don't forget, it's not just agents.>> Yep.>> It's tooling too. There's a whole growth around how tooling is becoming a really important layer in the agenda piece. So again, significant news.>> Yeah. And don't forget, the hundred million dollar investment that we're putting into the Gen AI Innovation Center. Because you build all these great services and tools, you got to help people be able to use them. Otherwise, it's the car parked in the garage, right? So we're investing significantly in helping people be successful in that.>> Your focus is Enterprise Strategy. Can you explain what your job is? Because that could mean a couple of different things. Now, just as context, you know with theCUBE, we've been covering the enterprise area hard over the past 16 years, but specifically the past year. AI is super enthusiastic in the enterprise, but there's like a backlog of POCs. The enterprises are evaluating this, is what we're seeing. So they're going to the cloud. The on-prem data, the states are being evaluated. So it's a lot of interest, tons of activity, but the production windows are narrow. But was hearing they're opening up with tools like Kiro.>> Yeah.>> So what do you do? What's your main focus?>> Yeah. So as an enterprise strategist, I'm part of a team of 15 former CIOs and CTOs. Some of my colleagues are at Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Capital One, NASA. I was the chief information officer at Foundation Medicine, world's largest genomics company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And so as a team, we spend time engaging with our enterprise accounts, but really our strategic accounts, in sharing our experiences, our collective experiences as a team. But John, we also learn a lot from them. We see best practices, and we see some things not to do also. And so we just try to help share that wisdom with our customers. And we do that through that one-on-one interactions. We do it through writing a lot of books and blogs and also speaking at a lot of events like we have here. And you know, those are->> So you're coming in from a practitioner, peer practitioner angle.>> That's the idea.>> Best practice, consultative, strategic.>> Yep.>> Alignment, basically.>> Well, really it is. Because we walked in their shoes, right?>> Yeah.>> So we can say now, I haven't implemented generative AI, because I've been with AWS for six years, so I can't say as a CIO, here's how to implement generative AI.>> Yeah, but you've been a leader. You can understand that.>> I've been a leader.>> You're not native like the young guns coming in.>> Exactly.>> You're actually taking to it to fish like water. But you have enough experience to know what success may look like.>> Well, in talking to all these customers and seeing them thrive and struggle in some areas, we're able to identify what differentiates those that succeed versus those that don't. And then we share that information with our customers. Again, truly it's transformative.>> Tom, you brought up a good point. I don't really bring this up a lot because it's more personal for me too, but I hear this a lot. "You're too old.", me talking to me. "You're too old, how could you know? You're this CUBE guy. How do you know about AI?"
First of all, my computer science degrees were put to some good work. Yes, I might not be born in the AI era, like some of these lucky young guns coming up now.>> Yeah.>> Who are in the best time of their lives in tech history. However, I'm a founder, so I've been there. You're a leader. So leaders can empathize and understand AI and still scale it and bring it to market. So the whole narrative of you're not our generation... By the way, systems generation set the table for supercomputing.>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.>> So the systems revolution is back, but the AI software revolution's here. So you have the confluence of two worlds, the systems world, which we were born in, I was born in, and the new software world coming together. So there's a whole talent. How do you understand? It's a little bit long-winded, but my point is, there's a cultural intersection. It's not old versus new. It's one thing.>> Well, it really is. And we as a team are trying to take the advice that we give to our customers. And a phrase that I came up with that I love using is, you got to be a technology teenager. If you have teenagers, it takes them a half second before they're on whatever tool, on Snapchat, on TikTok, exploring it, learning it, using how to do it. They immerse themselves in it. And so, we are also immersing ourselves in it. This technology, it might be overstated, is transformative, but it's interesting in that this technology, and it's true with any, but it's more true with this, that you learn by doing. So you got to get out there. You got to get your feet wet. You got to play around with this so that you can truly understand what's possible with it. Yeah, so being that technology teenager, man, it's important.>> You look in the mirror like, "Well, I'm not a teenager anymore." As customers, we talk to enterprise leaders, CIOs, and also developers, the whole narrative's clearly pro AI.>> Yeah.>> This guardrails, this security resilience, fraud bars that are really high on AppSec review, all kinds of things that are normal. But when you look at how the transformation angle is, what's your advice? Because when you look at what it changes, it's not an IT project, it's a business model transformation as well. So there's technology transformation, business transformation. How are enterprises operationalize this? What's your view on this now? This center of excellences, which sometime become political, or become customer showcases, or it's run by the CTO, it's like, "We got to really understand this tech.">> Yeah.>> Be curious, be teenagers, and then hopefully get out of that business.>> Yeah.>> What's your view on the whole enterprise structural change?>> Yeah. Big question, but let me unpack it a little bit. My experience is that centers of excellence are always centered but seldom excellent. And so we actually advise customers. We get asked all time, "Should I centralize my AI or should I decentralize it?" Now, maybe the cop-out answer is, you should do both. So what we really tell them is take inspiration from say, HR. So HR is centralized inside your company, I guarantee it, right? Try to implement your own HR policies. You'll find out, right?>> It's a system record, really.>> Yeah. But that core piece is centralized. But as a manager, as a leader, you're expected to understand and apply those things out as a leader inside your organization. AI is the same. I need a small centralized team dealing with governance, with strategy, with tooling, but I now need to empower everyone. And what we're seeing is fascinating is that rise of the citizen developer, right? We've talked about the citizen developer for a while. What we really meant was someone with an Excel spreadsheet doing some data analytics.>> Yeah.>> Yeah, okay.>> And a little visualization.>> A little visualization. And we had some low-code, no-code tools. But I think now with Kiro and things, now we're on the precipice of really being able to get to it. But what's interesting about that, one, the citizen developer is exciting because I can get them to build solutions that matter to them. But I can also->> Here's a prototype.>> Yeah.>> Five-coded.>> Exactly.>> Look, production.>> But now I can also get those individuals to get more into, let's say a system mindset, system thinking. How do you write requirements? How do you think about designing systems? And I think they become better partners for IT when IT is building things as well. One of the challenges, and I don't know how it's going to play out if I'm honest.>> By the way, the collaboration point is huge, because that speeds up everything, meetings.>> Everything.>> Also, people have built-in biases, even though they might agree early on. I mean, we used this in code. Code is the ultimate objective thing. It piles or it doesn't.>> Yeah.>> People, "Oh, we agree, we were aligned." Well, down the road until there's a design document, no one really knows. "Oh, I meant that.">> Yeah. And this is where I don't know where it's going to go. ERP implementations struggle not because of the technology. They struggle because of people and process, and trying to get people to design and agree and come to you. And understand the consequences of the process decisions they make. Now, if we think about agentic AI, it's going to be processes and people. And it's going to be, okay, we want to automate this claims processing approach. Okay, but can you design it? Do you understand what the claims processing should be? How it should go? So I think that we're going to have a little bit of struggle, a little bit of challenge, where we build some muscle across the enterprises to be good in effect of that muscle.>> I like that muscle term. And I got to say, prior to this event, I did the halftime report, digital event preview. It's on theCube.net. Interviewed Matt Garman, all the top executives, the digital event preview, this halftime report. That was the number one thing I took away from AWS was the muscle that was being built internally using AI to do better things, and look at the product results. I mean, look at the charts. But then you can't be a practitioner and a producer of AI and not know AI.>> Yeah. Exactly.>> So that was one. The second thing is, the change of Amazon Web Services as an organization, the speed and scale of the change is off the charts. It's a huge organization, and it transformed itself in literally 12 months. I mean, that's incredible.>> Yeah.>> I'm a company. I'm like, "Oh, we're a big bank. We can never do that. We're like the aircraft carrier. We move very slowly.">> It's interesting you say it. We pride ourselves on innovation, right? And being a startup mentality and faster responsive to our customers, and I think you're seeing that play out over the last 12 months. I would also say, we've had a long-term vision on this and where we saw this going. And although others were reacting previously 6, 12 months ago in different ways, we've been playing a little bit of this long game towards agentic AI and where it was going, and as you said, positioning the company around that. And I think now you're starting to see the results and the things coming out of it. But yeah, I know I work for AWS, but I'm not surprised, this is who we are.>> All right. So your peers, obviously you've been the CIO, you know how hard it is. Now you add CISO in the mix.>> Yeah.>> You've got other C-level executives. Hell, Amazon even has their own chief security officer and a CISO because you got physical AI coming. So all kinds of new challenges, multimodal. So as a CIO or CXO running things, what would you say is the biggest challenge from a business model transformation? Is it identifying the problems to solve? Or is it the people management, change management side of it, or both? I mean, what would be the... You mentioned processing technology.>> Yeah. The answer is both. But let me talk to both of them just a little bit. We have to help the people through this transformation. This is going to change the nature of work, and that's exciting, but it's also terrifying. People need to understand how this is going to be beneficial for them. We talk a lot about something we call the frozen middle. The executives at the top are bought in. The person who just got to the company is like, "Yeah, just tell me where the break room is.", right?>> Yeah.>> "I'm just figuring things out." But it's that group in the middle that, by the way, run your company, right? They know how to make the company operate on a daily basis. They have questions in what's in it for them in this transformation? And until we can get them comfortable with where we're going on it, they drag things out. They ask lots of questions. So they ask for one more meeting, one more demo, because it's human nature. So I think we're seeing people swarm to get to that point, to really how we can help them get their people comfortable and enlist the power of their resources. And until we do that, I think there's going to be a little bit of a challenge in that.>> So it's confidence in.>> Yeah. It is.>> Giving people the confidence, nothing, just the enthusiasm.>> Yeah. In understanding what vital role they will play in this change. Because, hey look, the skills that you need are going to be different in three years. You're going to be managing agents in some way, and what does that mean, and how do you approach that?>> Yeah.>> And you're going to have to change, and we have to help our people make that change. But the good news is, we see that. We've done change management before. We know a lot of these best practices. We can do these things.>> All right, Tom, great to chat with you. Looking forward to doing more, because you're right in our wheelhouse. Obviously, we have a studio here. The number two independent media company in the show for the NYME, first podcast style. We're doing a lot of editorial content. Love to have you back on theCUBE->> Love to.>> I think really those from the field experiences now on Amazon Web Services' side, a lot of your peers in that role are under a lot of pressure.>> Yes.>> And they're motivated to change.>> Yes, they are.>> So I think it's a really good time in the enterprise across the board, not just the big banks like JP Morgan Chase, which by the way, 17 billion budget a year. That's a pretty good budget. But other banks don't have that. Other people don't have the big budgets.>> Yep.>> So they got to make intentional good decisions around their system architecture.>> Let's go help them out. Love to.>> You maybe writing books and blog posts. I'm certain you have an outbound content machine.>> Yeah.>> Are you pumping anything out? How do people get ahold of you? What coordinates? Share.>> Well, one, you can find me on the AWS website. You can find me and the team. You can get me on LinkedIn, but you can also search the Enterprise Strategy blog site. We publish a lot of blogs and all that information is available out there on that website.>> All right, now you're on theCUBE. Welcome to theCUBE.>> Thank you much.>> One more time.>> I appreciate it.>> All right. Welcome back.>> Thank you.>> Tom Godden's here. Enterprise Strategy, experienced CIO has been there, done that. Now on the Amazon, bringing those best practices. We're at a market where everyone's looking for best practice. And also what their peers are working on, because it's a generational set of decisions being made right now super fast, and the pace of play has never been this high. Of course, theCUBE is going hard and fast today. We'll be right back after this short break.>> Thank you.
