Amazon bolsters AI agent push with new executive hires, according to internal memos (www.businessinsider.com)

Amazon is doubling down on “agentic” AI by hiring two senior executives to accelerate developer tools and infrastructure for intelligent agents. David Richardson, a 16‑year AWS veteran who helped launch its Serverless business, returns as VP of AgentCore to lead the foundational agent infrastructure and related efforts such as the Strands SDK and Agent Builder within Bedrock. Joe Hellerstein, UC Berkeley database researcher and Hydro project lead, joins as VP and Distinguished Scientist to advance Kiro, AWS’s agentic IDE that drew over 100,000 users in its first week. For the AI/ML community this signals a push from AWS to own the end‑to‑end stack for agent-driven applications — from SDKs and builders to runtime infrastructure and developer UX. Key technical implications include tighter integration of distributed systems principles (Hydro) into the Kiro IDE to boost reliability and performance, and maturation of AgentCore as a production-grade substrate for deploying, orchestrating and managing complex multi‑agent workflows. Richardson’s developer‑platform experience and Hellerstein’s distributed‑systems pedigree point to AWS prioritizing scalability, observability and developer ergonomics, accelerating mainstream adoption of agentic paradigms and intensifying competition among cloud providers to host next‑generation AI applications.