AWS Summit DC 2026 | Dave Levy, AWS

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Dave Levy

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Dave Levy, AWS

Dave Levy

VP, Worldwide Public Sector AWS

In this interview from AWS Summit Washington, D.C. 2026, Dave Levy, vice president of worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services, joins theCUBE + NYSE Wired's Gemma Allen to discuss how governments and public sector organizations are moving from cloud migration to mission-ready AI execution. Levy outlines two landmark billion-dollar commitments announced at the summit: a forward deployed engineering program that embeds AWS engineers directly inside agencies for real-time, hands-on problem-solving — distinct from traditional consulting engagements — and an... Read more

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What is AWS's forward deployed engineering group, why is the company investing a billion dollars in it, and how will it support customers with cloud migrations, modernization, and agentic/generative AI? add

What has changed that enables a commitment to a 45‑day "live" deployment despite the usual data, governance, compliance, and organizational challenges? add

How is AWS addressing the migration of legacy on‑premise data center workloads to the cloud, and what is the target customer profile for that initiative? add

How can governments and public-sector organizations—often lacking the budgets and staffing of large enterprises—attract talent and adopt cloud/emerging technologies to build national infrastructure, and how can AWS help with that? add

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Dave Levy, AWS

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Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE here on the ground at AWS Summit Washington DC 2026. We have been having some fascinating conversations all day about this new paradigm shift for AWS, their clients, customers, builders, breakers, and what it means in the Agentic era. Joining me now for a conversation on how all this ties together and how we can make this real in practice is Dave Levy, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS. Welcome, Dave.

Dave Levy

>> Yeah, thanks for having me. It's exciting to be here.

Gemma Allen

>> So you certainly sit in an interesting place. We've had so many folks on the show today talking about all sorts of things: healthcare, cybersecurity, orchestration workflows inside governments. Your org really ties all of this together, right? It changes that from how do we make this a narrative to actual mission impact?

Dave Levy

>> Yeah, that's right. I mean, I absolutely get to get involved in a lot of that stuff and it's been really remarkable. Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> So busy day for you, some big announcements.

Dave Levy

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> Let's talk about them first. Let's talk about some of what we learned on the stage today.

Dave Levy

>> Sure.

Gemma Allen

>> Two things I guess really stood out to me. One is this billion dollar investment, putting your money where your mouth is, I guess, when it comes to actually moving folks from legacy data center environments. And then also embedding AWS engineers, true brain trusts inside federal agencies, right? Both of those provide a level of trust, a level of security, a level of partnership. But talk about the moment and the path that brought you to this.

Dave Levy

>> Yeah. Well, let's talk about the forward deployed engineering group first, which is also a billion dollar investment we're putting forward. And I think what's particularly exciting about that is we've heard a lot from customers over the years about the need for us and our partners to sit side by side with them during this journey. And when you're making a journey, whether it's a move from the cloud, a move from on-premises to the cloud, or you're modernizing something that's already in the cloud, or you're in this new era where you're doing things that are agentifying workflows, it would be great to have talent from AWS side by side with you, even on the keyboard, helping you do that. And that's what AWS forward deployed engineering is all about. And we're going to draw on resources of people across the company and new talent that are going to be able to help deliver on that promise of Agentic AI and Generative AI for our customers. So it's very exciting. Customers I think are thrilled about it. They're already asking about it. I mean, I've been in meetings today where customers are already saying, "How can I get access to this program?"

Gemma Allen

>> Stay on that for a second. We had a great conversation with Francesca earlier. She did a great job of positioning this.

Dave Levy

>> Yeah. She's the best at it for sure.

Gemma Allen

>> Excellent. I actually said that to her. I was like, "You must be great with clients."

Dave Levy

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> But we know that the consultancy space in tech has always been busy, right? It's always been noisy because it's opportunistic in many ways for a lot of folks. We think about this moment we're in right now, especially as it relates to a company which has designed the engine, helping folks actually deploy and deliver the value of that engine. AWS is obviously uniquely positioned to do that very, very well. Speed is a big thing though, right? She spoke about the 45-day sprint, live in 45, great tagline, but there's a lot of challenges to getting there. There's a lot of problems in data structure, governance, compliance, and the ways in which orgs have been run for such a long time. What do you think has really changed in this moment right now that you can commit to a 45-day timeline?

Dave Levy

>> Well, I think, look, we've got a framework that we think is proven and worked. It's worked inside of our own organization. We're seeing it work in our customers as well. And so I think we've got a framework and a set of tools that's going to allow us to get at these really hard problems quickly. And then if you think about the forward deployed engineering model, we're going to have really, really talented engineers sitting alongside of our customers quickly solving problems. They're not going to have to go and hunt to financers. They're not going to get a report afterwards that they have to implement. I mean, this is hands on real time. Let's get at the problem. Let's find where those data sources are and solve problems and getting access to them and let's bring them into new workflows. So I think that's what's unique about it. It's not going to be a classic consulting engagement. This is really about real time engineering.

Gemma Allen

>> Let's talk about the other billion dollar bet, which is this move for legacy data centers. Because what you're really saying to folks there is, look, you can spend your money on AI on other things, right? We can solve for this for you. And we know we hear a lot about tokenomics, about the cost of data centers, about CapEx spend. It's a big challenge. How do you think about the way in which AWS is meeting this moment for customers and who's the real, true, unique customer profile for this?

Dave Levy

>> Yeah. Well, look, there are so many workloads that are still, I'll use the word trapped, on-premise. And they're trapped for a reason, it could be that there are sunk costs involved in that workload. The work in migrating them off-prem is from off-premise to the cloud is fairly significant. Sometimes you're paying what we would call double bubble costs. You're paying for the workload and the associated operating costs while it's still on-prem while you're migrating to the cloud. So it can be a costly inefficient process to actually get some of those really important workloads into the cloud. And we want to help customers feel better about that. We want to help them move faster in doing that. We want to give them incentives to doing that. And so this program is really a way to do that. It's a way to offset some of that cost, improve the efficiency of doing that, and really give them some confidence, some confidence that it can get done. And we feel like that confidence will compound when they see some important workloads coming from on-premise data centers and into the cloud and working really well and operating and they hit go on Monday and everything works fine. We believe that's going to be a compounding effect and we want to make sure we're incenting them to do that.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. Well, it's certainly a very attractive proposition. When we think about the scope of your org and your work, public sector, government, I mean, there's so much happening right now.

Dave Levy

>> There is.

Gemma Allen

>> For a long time, I guess you could say, maybe I shouldn't say, but government and we think about government and tech, it wasn't necessarily the sexy cutting edge side of technology, right? But the pressure is on in all spaces now for everyone to keep a pace. There's this kind of fear out there that if you're not meeting the moment, you don't know where the next moment might land you.

Dave Levy

>> Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I've been working in the public sector space a long time and so I've always been really proud and complimentary of governments and the people doing that work all across the world. It's not easy work. Oftentimes it's highly regulated. It has a lot of risk. It's visible. And at the end of the day, every government is trying to deliver for their citizens in some way, whether that's through national security, or defense, or some sort of social program. And that just has a high impact, collecting taxes has a high impact on us. And so that government work is incredibly valuable to us as citizens. It's part of our culture, it's part of our history. And so there's been this notion that if you move too quickly, you would do something that could impact the citizens you support and the government that you have. And to some degree, that's right. You want to make sure you're getting things right. You want to make sure if somebody's taxes are filed, they're filed correctly and there's no mistakes. You want to make sure if you're carrying out a census that things are counted correctly and they're accurate. And I think there was a time that moving to modern technologies presented some risk, but I think those times are changing, and particularly now in this era of Agentic AI, we're seeing that governments have a bigger appetite for this sort of change because there's real value for us as citizens. Real value that they can deliver to us in terms of speed and accuracy, combating things like fraud, waste and abuse, improving national security and defense. So there's so many opportunities and I'm encouraged by what I see across the world with governments and they're moving faster than they ever have.

Gemma Allen

>> For sure. And when we think about some of what you said today, Dave, you're saying that this is not necessarily about cloud, this is about building national infrastructure, right? It's by thinking about the world and the future of this world from the perspective of governments and how we essentially own that infrastructure and the path that infrastructure takes us. One of the challenges for a long time has been, it's hard for governments or public sector orgs to compete with large enterprises per se, because they don't have the budgets, they don't have the staffing. How do you think that, I guess those two things can change and shift and how can AWS help with that? Like as you said, when speed is certainly becoming more accelerated than we've ever seen it.

Dave Levy

>> Yeah. Talent has always been an issue. I hear that a lot, that governments don't have the talent, but one of the things we've said to a lot of our customers is, one of the ways to attract talent is to bring in the latest technology, is to bring in cloud and emerging technologies, those sorts of things that talent wants to work with. Talent isn't solely driven by their compensation. The mission of government's a really exciting one and a lot of talented individuals want to be able to serve the mission of government. They want to be able to serve in healthcare or in social services and in other areas. And so bringing in the best technology you can, which we hope we're a part of that is also an attractor of talent. It's a way to build your workforce, to get them to working on fun, cool stuff that really has an impact. And so we see governments starting to do that and we see the trajectory changing for talent attraction for them. And then on the budget and the money cycle, look, I think every government would tell you that they're looking for ways to get more efficient and be better stewards of all of our tax dollars and all of our money. And bringing in new technology to help things become more efficient, to help with better service delivery I think is only going to improve their fiscal responsibility and allow them to invest even more in these sorts of technologies that are hopefully additive to our lives in terms of making everybody's life better.

Gemma Allen

>> So when we think about some of those technologies and product sets that folks can explore and develop on, we've heard some really interesting cases today, Bedrock's been used in so many ways, other parts of the stack too. What are you most excited about right now? Like what has really shocked you this year? I'm sure people are always probably pitching you their great wins, right?

Dave Levy

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> But what has really made you think, "Wow, that's pretty incredible," that didn't happen a year ago.

Dave Levy

>> I mean, I've seen everything from big use cases that are having big impact to things that are smaller that just have meaningful impact on people's lives. We have a council in the UK that is actually using AI to help their citizens read lease agreements and navigate their housing better. And I think that's just a fantastic use of AI. We have cases where they're using sensors inside of elderly's homes to sense things that are happening so that emergency services or social services can come and respond to their needs quicker or get ahead of their needs. In the healthcare and research paradigm, things are happening. I mean, diagnosis are happening faster, patients are getting discharged from hospitals faster. They're identifying opportunities before people get sick using AI and preventing or reducing emergency department visits and burdens on staff. And so there's just things all across the board that are happening that I think are very compelling and very exciting.

Gemma Allen

>> I think when we think of those stories where you're helping everyday citizens do something like read a lease or apply for planning permission, it certainly brings AI and its opportunity to life in a way that feels very hopeful, right? As well as some of the other narratives that we hear. So it's wonderful to hear these stories. What is ahead for you and the team? I mean, you have a big organization, like global public sector at AWS, that's a lot of GOs, a lot of competing facets too, even within your own stack. How do you prioritize and what does the next six to 12 months look like?

Dave Levy

>> Yeah. Our priorities are pretty consistent. The way we work is we put the customer first and we work backwards from their priorities. I mean, primarily what my team is doing is spending time with customers and partners, and they tell us what it is they're trying to accomplish and we work backwards from that. And either we're delivering some innovation on their behalf or we're innovating with them, and oftentimes the great ideas for their mission or whatever they're delivering, it comes from them. It doesn't come from us. It's us enabling them to realize these sorts of things, and we do things like visioning sessions with our customers. I mean, we'll spend an entire day, if they'll allow us and give us that time, we'll spend an entire day or an entire two or three days with customers just visioning on how to change things, on how to redesign the research workflow of the future, or how to do high performance computing in the cloud. What does that mean? And giving a single researcher and interrogator access to the exact same resources that an entire research organization might have. And so we spend nearly every day, seven days a week thinking about and working with customers to help them achieve those things.

Gemma Allen

>> I think that's a very interesting point to end on, that sometimes you need to look backwards to move forward, right?

Dave Levy

>> Yep.

Gemma Allen

>> It's very important, and at this moment right now in the world of tech and all of this excitement and sometimes chaos that surrounds us, it's more important than ever. So Dave Levy, thank you so much for joining us in theCUBE.

Dave Levy

>> Yeah. No, thank you. It's been great.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen. That is a wrap on day one at the AWS Summit here on the ground in Washington DC. We have a phenomenal lineup of guests coming on the show tomorrow with some conversations on cybersecurity, sovereign AI, AI orchestration across government organizations, what it means to the intelligence community, and some true brain trusts at AWS joining us. So please stay tuned tomorrow. Thanks so much.

Dave Levy

>> All right.