NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 4 – At its annual cloud-computing conference between December 1 and 5, Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled what executives described as a “tectonic shift” in enterprise artificial intelligence: the arrival of agentic, autonomous AI.
With 29 new capabilities for Amazon Connect and a broad upgrade of its AI partner ecosystem, AWS is betting 2026 will be the year AI steps out of pilot mode and into everyday business operations.
For AWS clients in Kenya and across Africa, the implications could be transformative as an IDC report indicates that 23% of organizations expect to achieve full deployment of agentic AI technology in the next 12 months, with 65% of organizations expecting full deployment by 2027.
What AWS Launched
During the AWS re:Invent 2025 conference, Amazon rolled out major additions to Amazon Connect, its cloud-based contact center platform. According to its November announcement, the new offerings give AI agents the ability to understand, reason, and act across voice and messaging channels to handle both simple and complex customer interactions.
Amazon is expanding its Nova portfolio with four new models designed to improve price performance across reasoning, multimodal processing, conversational AI, code generation and agentic workloads. A new model, Nova Forge, introduces what Amazon calls “open training,” allowing organisations to access pre trained model checkpoints and combine their own proprietary data with Amazon curated datasets.
“Nova Act achieves breakthrough 90% reliability for browser-based UI automation workflows built by early customers. Companies like Reddit are using Nova Forge to replace multiple specialized models with a single solution, while Hertz accelerated development velocity by 5x with Nova Act,” the company said.
Using the newly introduced “Nova Sonic” speech model, these agents can interpret tone, sentiment and intent. In practice, that means a caller reaching out to check an order or request a refund might complete the entire transaction through a natural speech conversation, without touching a menu or waiting for a human.
For organisations that still value human-led support, AWS added real-time AI assistance for contact-centre staff. The new agents can surface context, recommend next steps, even take over routine tasks like documentation or form-filling, allowing human agents to focus on more nuanced issues.
Beyond Amazon Connect, AWS also expanded its AI partner credentials, evolving its former “Generative AI Competency” into a full “AI Competency”, now including three new categories: Agentic AI Applications, Agentic AI Tools, and Agentic AI Consulting Services.
“Since its launch in 2024, we have invested over $115 million in the AWS AI Competency, demonstrating our commitment to accelerating successful customer AI adoption through Specialization Partners,” AWS said in a statement. “These new categories reflect the rapid market advancement, helping customers find Partners who can move them from experimentation to production-ready autonomous systems.”
These categories, AWS said, are meant to certify partners capable of building AI systems that perceive environment, reason about goals, and act independently across multiple platforms which are basically, full-fledged AI agents rather than reactive chatbots.
AWS now lists over 60 validated Agentic-AI partners. In a press statement, the company said that customers working with AI Competency Partners are rolling out production-grade AI solutions about 25% faster than before.
“This expansion to include Agentic AI categories reinforces our commitment to help customers move from experimentation to production-grade autonomous systems that can perceive, reason, and act independently,” said Ruba Borno, VP Global Specialists and Partners at AWS.
“This isn’t just about technology validation; it’s about connecting customers with Partners who have proven they can deliver responsible, scalable AI solutions that drive measurable business value.”
The cloud company launched three frontier agents: the Kiro autonomous agent, the AWS Security Agent and the AWS DevOps Agent. According to AWS, the Kiro autonomous agent functions as a virtual software developer embedded within engineering teams, while the AWS Security Agent is designed to act as a dedicated security adviser. The AWS DevOps Agent is positioned as an always on operational support system.
AWS said early enterprise users have already begun applying the agents to core software processes. Organisations including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, SmugMug and Western Governors University have used one or more of the agents to streamline and automate parts of the software development lifecycle.
Running AI applications at scale remains expensive and resource-intensive, particularly for AI agents that spend significant time on routine tasks that don’t require advanced intelligence.
AWS launched new Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker AI capabilities that make advanced model customization accessible to any developer.
“Reinforcement Fine Tuning (RFT) in Amazon Bedrock simplifies the model customization process, delivering 66% accuracy gains on average over base models, with customers like Salesforce demonstrating up to 73% improvement in accuracy over base models,” the company stated.
What This Means for Kenyan Cloud Users
For Kenyan businesses already running workloads on AWS, from telcos and fintech firms to retail and customer-service providers, the new agentic AI tools could usher in a wave of automation and cost-efficiency.
A December 2025 report by Omdia found that local cloud firms and system integrators could see revenues multiply by up to seven times via AI-powered services, as client demand for automation and digital services grows.
For example, a large telecom operator or mobile money provider could deploy AI agents to manage routine customer queries such as billing issues, password resets, account status checks, freeing human agents for complex tasks. Insurance firms could automate claims processing, while e-commerce platforms could use AI agents to handle order tracking, returns or delivery support in multiple languages.
“In 2026, we’re offering an additional $25K in Marketing Development Funds (MDF) for achieving validation in any of the Agentic categories, in addition to the $50K in MDF that Partners receive for the AI Specialization,” AWS said.
“To accelerate your path to the AI Specialization, we launched an agentic review process that provides real-time guidance and automated validation, cutting the application processing time by up to 70%.”
Because Amazon Connect’s agents support natural speech interactions and even sentiment detection, services can become more accessible in Kenya, where many customers may prefer voice over text or app-based support. This could improve inclusivity and customer experience at scale.
For local AWS partners and startups, the expanded AI Competency represents a new business opportunity. Firms with technical expertise can now build and deploy autonomous AI workflows for clients, tapping into marketing development funds (MDF) and fast-track validation processes that AWS launched alongside its new categories.
Agents, Observability, and Governance
One of the most important recent additions is support for “agent observability,” a suite of tools that allow organisations to track what AI agents do: how they reason, which data sources they use, and whether their actions comply with governance policies.
For regulated sectors in Kenya such as banking, insurance and healthcare, this transparency may be critical. Firms will be able to audit AI-driven decisions, review what data was accessed, and ensure AI actions remain compliant.
Moreover, AWS emphasised that agentic AI isn’t about replacing human workers wholesale. Rather, it’s designed to complement human labour: systems take on repetitive, rule-based tasks, while people handle strategy, oversight, and sensitive decision-making.
The launch of agentic AI capabilities comes as AWS doubles down on an infrastructure-first AI strategy. Also announced at re:Invent 2025 was a new generation of AI-training hardware, including Trainium chips, and updated foundation models under the Nova brand, all aimed at giving enterprises the tools to build, scale and run autonomous AI services securely.
This marks a shift for AWS: from providing cloud computing and AI primitives, to delivering complete AI-native business platforms.
For Africa’s cloud ecosystem, this could be a watershed moment. With regulatory and data-sovereignty constraints, agentic AI’s tool-based, cloud-native architecture may offer a pathway to sophisticated automation without requiring full on-premises infrastructure.
With its re:Invent 2025 announcements, AWS appears to have laid out not just a roadmap, but a runway for agentic AI to scale globally. For 2026, “agentic AI” may cease to be a buzzword and become infrastructure, quietly powering call centres, banking systems, e-commerce platforms and service desks around the world.
For Kenyan AWS users and cloud partners, the shift may come fastest where need is greatest: customer-facing services built for inclusivity, efficiency and scale. The question now is not if Kenya will adopt agentic AI, but how quickly.
