AWS Financial Services Symposium 2026 | Preethi CN, AWS

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Preethi CN

Director, AgentCore

AWS

play_circle_outline AgentCore on AWS: Secure Agentic AI Platform for Building, Operating and Scaling Agents with Identity, Access, Runtime, Tools, Memory, Observability

play_circle_outline AgentCore Payments Preview: Autonomous Agents, Paid APIs, X402 Protocol, and Coinbase–Stripe Wallet Partnerships

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Preethi CN, AWS

Preethi CN

Director, AgentCore AWS

In this interview from the AWS Financial Services Symposium 2026 in New York City, Preethi CN, director of AgentCore at Amazon Web Services, joins theCUBE's Rebecca Knight to discuss the launch of AgentCore Payments and how enabling AI agents to transact autonomously marks the next frontier of agentic AI. CN explains that today's agents are blocked not by a lack of reasoning but by an inability to pay when they encounter paid endpoints — forcing developers into months of bespoke integration work involving separate API keys, billing relationships and deep paym... Read more

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium here in New York City. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I would like to welcome our next guest to the program. She is Preethi CN, director of AgentCore at AWS. Welcome, Preethi.

Preethi CN

>> Thank you, Rebecca. Great to be here today.

Rebecca Knight

>> You're fresh from the main stage, giving a great talk, which we're going to get into today. But why don't you begin by telling our viewers a little bit about AgentCore?

Preethi CN

>> Yes. I'm director of Agentcore. And Agentcore is an agentic AI platform of AWS that enables our customers to build, operate in agents and scale. And it provides a set of foundational services such as identity access control, runtime execution, tool connectivity, and memory observability and many more. Developers who want to build agents can just bring all of these building blocks together and get the highest level of security, reliability, and scale. And all of these building blocks can be integrated with just a few lines of code, under a few minutes, and they have their agents ready and working in production. We are very excited about this platform and we have added several new capabilities to AgentCore, and continuing to add many of them.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, we're going to hear more about that, but let's start with the problem. Because when an AI agent hits a paywall today, it just stops. How big an issue is that in practice and how many use cases is that blocking?

Preethi CN

>> Yes. Before we answer that question, one of the big things we would probably want to understand here is that agents are becoming very powerful, and that is because of their reasoning capability. And this is resulting in agents being autonomous. And autonomous means agents are able to compose a bunch of tools in the right sequence to accomplish a specific task. And not all of these tools and services are free of charge. When an agent hits a paywall and tries to access these paid endpoints, the agent stops. Not because it cannot reason and act, it's because it cannot pay. In such a case, the agent would probably result in stale answers or incomplete answers, or developers have to go and build bespoke integrations with many of these services, which would involve having separate API accounts, API keys, and also billing relationships. And that can be months of engineering effort requiring deep payment expertise. And that is a real challenge when agents hit a paywall.

Rebecca Knight

>> What was the moment at AWS when you said, "Hey, we could solve this."?

Preethi CN

>> Yes. I think there were a few trends that were happening. Basically, agents becoming very capable and able to execute complex workflows and select the tools that they need to accomplish the task. Though many content on the industry were also becoming paid, we already see website content which are paid. Many of the MCP servers, APIs, which offer capabilities are paid, and they were just getting designed for paper use consumption model, which works great for agentic consumption. And at the same time, we also saw protocols evolving in the industry, like Coinbase introduced the X402 protocol, which enables agents to... Which actually leverages the native HTTP status code for determining what the payment required and how to make that payment. We saw a lot of these changes in the industry. And it really felt that, hey, now is the moment to unlock the next evolution of agentic AI, and making them capable of having payments autonomously with the same principles that we built in AgentCore, which is any model, any protocol, any framework. And where developers can make their agents capable of payments with just a few lines of code was very exciting for us. And that is a moment where we felt that this is the investment we want to make. And here we are today. We just announced the launch of AgentCore Payments, a new capability that is available in preview starting today. And we are really excited about it. We have launched this in partnership with Coinbase, who provide the wallet and the payment facilitation, and Stripe who provide the wallet support. Very exciting.

Rebecca Knight

>> It is exciting. Who are you hearing that's most excited about this? And what are the companies that you're hearing from, and what are they trying to do?

Preethi CN

>> We are working with companies across the industry, whether it is media, financial services, legal, and several startups too. One of the startups, Heurist AI, is building a product for financial research analysis. The agent talks to several other paid endpoints for accessing content such as analyst sentiment, latest news, and also data to basically help gather all of this information and process them, generate insights that can be well consumed by end users. They are very excited about it, and they were able to integrate with AgentCore Payments with just a few lines of code and get their agents ready to pay. And we have also had customers like Warner Brothers Discovery, LexisNexis, National Australian Bank, who are also exploring AgentCore for their agent e-commerce strategies. We are working with customers across the entire spectrum in the industry. And it's nascent, it's new. And we are excited to partner with them and support them in every step of the way.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, congratulations. What is next? What's on the roadmap next?

Preethi CN

>> Well, we are just starting with micropayments, and that makes very useful for agents to access paid endpoints. And we see that this is going to be a huge unlock. And we want to move and contribute more from here. We see the biggest opportunity with commercial transactions as well. Think about agents paying for flights, reservation, or hotel reservation, or completing purchases across different merchant platforms. If you can think about all of these different problems, there's a wide spectrum of what an agent can pay for. And we at AgentCore want to keep this experience consistent for developers as we add new capabilities, whether that could be support for additional protocols or adding buyer ident verification, and providing customers the full visibility and observability into the payment life cycle. There's a lot to do there. And we are very excited to work with payment ecosystem partners and work with the industry on how we can shape these protocols and how we can shape this product for the future.

Rebecca Knight

>> Preethi, exciting times. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Preethi CN

>> Thank you so much for having me here, Rebecca. Excited to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium.