Lee Gyu-lee is a business writer at The Korea Times, focusing primarily on IT & telecommunications, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and KOTRA. Prior to this, she has covered a wide range of cultural news, from film, television and K-pop to lifestyle and fashion.
AWS bets on multi-agent as next AI paradigm, unveils 2026 partner strategy
Amazon Web Service (AWS) Data & AI Go-To-Market Vice President Rahul Pathak speaks during a press conference at its office in Gangnam District, Seoul, Wednesday. Courtesy of AWS
By Lee Gyu-lee
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is accelerating its push into the agentic artificial intelligence (AI) market, betting on multi-agentic workflows and expanded global partnerships to help its customers turn generative AI experiments into “immediate,” measurable business outcomes.
“2026 is the year of agents and our goal is to really work with our partners to help our customers navigate this time of change,” the company’s Data & AI Go-To-Market Vice President, Rahul Pathak, said during a press conference at its office in Gangnam District, Seoul, on Wednesday.
Pathak said customers and partners are moving beyond single generative AI tools toward a multi-agent setup, chaining specialized agents to analyze existing IT assets, draft specifications, generate code and monitor workloads.
“We’re seeing comprehensive AI solutions that are really delivering business value for customers, with measurable business outcomes such as 50 to 85 percent productivity improvements, four‑times return on investment and accelerated time to value across industries from financial services and healthcare to manufacturing and insurance,” he said.
AWS aims to make that shift replicable by offering comprehensive agentic AI stacks, including application frameworks, purpose-built infrastructure and a growing marketplace of prebuilt agents for them to assemble and customize automated workflows for their specific business needs.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Head of Korea Bang Hee-ran speaks during a press conference at its office in Gangnam District, Seoul, Wednesday. Courtesy of AWS
To support this strategy, the company is tightening its strategic ties with global AI players. Building on its deepening alliance with Anthropic, AWS will support the latest Claude Opus 4.7 model on Amazon Bedrock, positioning it as a key building block for designing and running complex AI agents across industries.
In Korea, AWS is working with local managed services providers across manufacturing, retail and financial services, such as LG CNS, Doosan Digital Innovation and CJ OliveNetworks, to take the expertise they have built inside their own groups and apply it to into broader external projects.
AWS Head of Korea Bang Hee-ran said POSCO DX reduced engineering drafting time by 90 percent after building an AWS-based agentic development environment, while CJ OliveNetworks saw a 5.7 percent increase in store sales using an AI-based demand forecasting model on AWS.
For 2026, the company outlined three key partner priorities: expanding partner coverage and deepening collaboration, accelerating growth of the AWS Marketplace and strengthening industry-specific expertise.
“We believe that when our partners’ deep industry domain knowledge is combined with AI, it becomes their most powerful competitive edge. And based on that strength, the main way AWS supports them is through co‑selling,” Bang said. “You can go farther and achieve more together, so AWS Korea is working to strengthen support by setting shared goals and moving toward them jointly with our partner team and partner companies.”