Top announcements of the AWS Summit in New York, 2026 | Amazon Web Services (opens in new tab)
AWS Summit New York 2026 focused on making AI agents more capable, secure, autonomous, and easier to operate in production. Announcements spanned Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, security automation, developer tooling, workplace agents, and S3 data management. The overall direction is toward agents that can access governed knowledge, act independently, and continuously improve while remaining subject to enterprise controls. ## Building More Capable Agents - **Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base** simplifies enterprise RAG with native data connectors, Smart Parsing for multi-format data, and an Agentic Retriever for complex, multi-step queries. - **Web Search for Bedrock AgentCore** provides managed, current, cited web knowledge while keeping data within the customer’s secured AWS environment. - **Bedrock AgentCore harness** is now generally available, allowing developers to define an agent’s model, tools, skills, and instructions through configuration rather than custom orchestration loops. - **AWS Context**, coming soon, will map relationships across organizational data into a knowledge graph. Agents will be able to use governed relationships, business rules, and domain knowledge at runtime. - **AWS WAF Bot Control** lets publishers and content owners price, meter, and collect payment from AI bots accessing content and APIs, with scoped access enforced at the edge. ## Securing Agents and Applications - **AWS Continuum**, available in gated preview, aggregates vulnerability findings, ranks them by business impact, verifies exploitability, and routes fixes through existing development processes. - **AWS Security Agent**, now part of Continuum, adds: - Threat modeling based on the STRIDE framework - Pull-request code scanning and remediation across major Git platforms - IDE integrations through Kiro, Claude Code, and MCP - These tools are intended to let developers perform security reviews and address vulnerabilities without leaving their normal workflows. ## AI-Assisted Software Development - **Kiro for iOS**, in gated preview, lets developers start, monitor, steer, and approve Kiro sessions from a phone, including reviewing diffs and approving changes without keeping a laptop running. - **AWS DevOps Agent** adds release readiness reviews and autonomous release testing. It evaluates changes against natural-language standards and tests them in production-like environments. - **AWS Transform continuous modernization**, in preview, scans repositories against configurable technical-debt baselines and can autonomously generate remediation pull requests. ## Autonomous Workplace Agents - New **Amazon Quick autonomous agents** can work in the background with defined expertise, tone, permissions, and tools. - Example use cases include: - A finance agent processing incoming orders - A sales agent analyzing CRM, email, and Slack activity - Agents drafting follow-ups, identifying risks, and recommending next steps - A new **activity feed** combines email, messaging, calendars, and tasks into a prioritized view that adapts to the user’s communication and work patterns. ## Richer Metadata for Amazon S3 - **S3 annotations** allow up to 1 GB of mutable, queryable context to be attached directly to an object. - The feature targets AI agents and autonomous workflows that need to discover and interpret data without maintaining separate metadata systems. AWS’s announcements point toward an agent ecosystem that combines managed knowledge retrieval, web access, security automation, autonomous development workflows, and persistent workplace assistance. Organizations adopting these capabilities should pair autonomy with strong governance, scoped permissions, and continuous validation in production.
