Agents as teammates and future workplace shifts

Did you ever walk into a conference session thinking you were ready for the week, only to realise the announcements were coming so fast that you almost needed an agent of your own to keep up? That was the mood across Las Vegas, and it was the backdrop for my conversation with Madhu Parthasarathy, the general manager for Agent Core at AWS.

He has spent the week at the centre of AWS's wave of agentic AI news, working on the ideas that are already moving from keynotes and demos into the hands of real enterprise teams. Sitting down with him offered a rare moment of clarity among the noise, and his calm take on what actually matters helped bring the bigger picture into focus.

Madhu talked through the thinking behind Agent Core and why he believes 2026 will be the year enterprises finally begin shifting from prototypes to production-scale agents. He walked me through the two areas customers keep coming back to, trust and performance, and why the new policy framework and agent evaluations could remove long-standing barriers to deployment.

His examples were grounded in real behaviour he is seeing inside large companies, whether that is internal support workloads, developer productivity, meeting preparation, or customer-facing flows designed to reduce the friction between intent and outcome.

We also explored the deeper shift introduced by Nova Forge, including the idea of blending enterprise data with model checkpoints to create domain-specific agents that can work with greater accuracy and context. Madhu explained why there will never be a one-size-fits-all model and how choice remains central to AWS's agentic AI approach.

My guest also reflected on how infrastructure changes, such as Trainium three ultra servers and expanded Nova model families, are shaping the pace at which companies can experiment, evaluate, and adopt emerging capabilities.

Trust surfaced again and again in our conversation. Madhu was clear that non-deterministic systems also introduce concerns, which is why action boundaries and guardrails are becoming as important as model quality. He described the excitement he is seeing from customers who now feel they have workable ways to give agents responsibility without handing over the keys entirely.

As he put it, this is the moment where confidence begins to grow because the guardrails finally meet the expectations of enterprise leaders.

We closed with the topic many people have been whispering about all week, modernization. Madhu reflected on AWS Transform, the push to help organisations move away from legacy architectures far faster than before, and the impact that agentic systems will have as they support full stack migrations across Windows environments and custom languages.

Madhu cuts through the noise with a grounded view of reliable autonomy, multi-agent orchestration, policy-driven safety, and the shift toward agents as true collaborators.

The question now is where you see the biggest opportunity. How might these agent-based systems change your workflows, and what would it take for you to trust them with the tasks you never seem to have time for? I would love to hear your thoughts.

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