The Next Great Digital Shift: Why AI Agents Are the New Cloud Computing
For more than fifteen years, Amazon Web Services, or AWS, has stood as the definitive leader in a technological revolution we now simply call “the cloud.” But according to one of the executives who helped build that initial wave, we are on the cusp of an even bigger upheaval, one that will fundamentally change how businesses operate.
AWS CEO Matt Garman recently delivered a powerful assessment, stating that the rise of artificial intelligence agents represents the most significant technology shift the industry has seen “since the beginning of cloud computing” itself. Given that Garman was one of the first product managers when AWS launched its initial set of services back in 2006, his perspective carries serious weight. It’s a bold comparison, putting today’s AI development on par with the very invention of utility computing that reshaped the world.
So, what exactly is an AI agent, and why is it drawing such a historic parallel?
The key distinction lies in autonomy. Current-generation AI like simple chatbots or assistants can only respond to a query or execute a single, defined action. AI agents, or what AWS is calling “frontier agents,” go much further. They are designed to be truly autonomous, meaning you can give them a high-level goal, and they will independently figure out the multi-step plan to achieve it. These agents have the memory and capability to work on complex projects for hours or even days without needing constant human intervention.
In essence, they move beyond being mere assistants to become autonomous digital workers.
AWS is already rolling out this new class of agents, focusing first on the software development lifecycle, which is the heart of any modern enterprise. For example, the new **Kiro autonomous agent** acts as a virtual developer. You can assign it a task, like fixing a bug, and the agent will independently navigate code repositories, write the fix, and submit the new code as a pull request for human review.
Beyond coding, there’s the **AWS Security Agent**, which can actively scan applications for vulnerabilities and even perform penetration testing, automating what has historically been a time-intensive and expensive manual process. And for operational continuity, the **AWS DevOps Agent** can identify the root cause of a system failure in a matter of minutes, a task that often takes seasoned human engineers hours to resolve.
This “agentic” transformation is viewed by some executives as the source for the next 80 to 90 percent of all enterprise AI value. This is why AWS is betting so heavily on its development platform, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, to help companies build, deploy, and manage these systems at scale.
The first era of cloud computing was about paying for computing power as you needed it. The new era of AI agents is about paying for *outcomes*. When a developer agent fixes a bug, a security agent runs a test, or a DevOps agent resolves an outage, that’s a clear, tangible result delivered without direct human management. This shift from renting infrastructure to enabling autonomous business processes is what makes the comparison to the birth of the cloud so compelling. It signals that our relationship with technology is about to change from issuing commands to simply defining goals.