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AI agents are your next customers.

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In this critical discussion, Mike Levy from AWS and Jon Yoo from Sugar sit down with Vince Menzione to explore the seismic shifts occurring within the AWS Marketplace, focusing heavily on the recent launch of AI Agents and Tools. Mike Levy details AWS’s comprehensive strategy to provide not just off-the-shelf agents, but the foundational ‘ingredients’—like security, guardrails, and knowledge bases—via the marketplace to help enterprises become “agentic.” Jon Yoo provides the partner perspective, highlighting the immense but often misunderstood role of channel partners in marketplace revenue, and provocatively challenges the current state of AI ‘features,’ emphasizing that the future requires agents to truly understand a business’s tribal knowledge and processes, not just rules-based workflows. The conversation culminates with the two sharing best practices, including the AWS COSS (Characteristics of Successful Sellers) framework, to help ISVs and partners accelerate their growth and effectively monetize in this new, AI-driven cloud economy.

Key Takeaways

• The AWS Marketplace is now offering a comprehensive suite of AI agents and tools, including agent development platforms and essential security ingredients.


• AWS is working across the AI stack, from underlying hardware like Inferentia chips to foundational services like Bedrock for accessing LLMs.


• The Marketplace organization at AWS is strategically integrated within the Partner Organization to build go-to-market channels and procurement systems.


• The growth of the private offer business and the inclusion of Channel Partner Private Offers (CPPOs) is fundamental to the Marketplace’s future strategy.


• Successful sellers on AWS Marketplace are guided by the COSS (Characteristics of Successful Sellers) framework, which has been shown to accelerate growth by 31 times.


• Partners new to the Marketplace should “start narrow” by proving their motion manually before investing in automation, focusing on a clear, simple value proposition.

If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins.

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Key Tags

AWSMarketplace, AIagents, Bedrock, ISVstrategy, ChannelPartner, COSSframework, CloudMonetization, Sugarplatform, AmazonQ, AgentCore, PrivateOffers, LLMs, GenerativeAI, GoToMarket, CloudEcosystem

Ultimate Partner is the independent community for technology leaders navigating the tectonic shifts in cloud, AI, marketplaces, and co-selling. Through live events, UPX membership, advisory, and the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® podcast, we help organizations align with hyperscalers, accelerate growth, and achieve their greatest results through successful partnering.

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Transcript

[00:00:00 ] Michael Levy: Uh, if we just double click on, you know, what it, what is an AI agent? ’cause it’s probably important, then we kind of have a shared understanding of what that is. Um, there’s a number of, uh, call it ingredients to the recipe of an AI agent.

[00:00:15 ] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzi, your host, and my mission is to help leaders like you.

[00:00:22 ] Vince Menzione: Achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. We just came off Ultimate Partner live at Caresoft Training Center in Reston, Virginia. Over two days, we gathered top leaders to tackle the real shifts shaping our industry. If you weren’t in the room, this episode brings you right to the edge of what’s next.

[00:00:43 ] Vince Menzione: Let’s dive in. So I am thrilled to welcome. So the first time as a sponsor of Ultimate Partner, and also to be up on stage with me, an organization that I also had a, you know, I was at Microsoft, you have to realize the lineage of how these organizations all work together. Uh, this little company that was a, they were like a bookseller company, a little company.

[00:01:10 ] Vince Menzione: And then they, uh, decided that they were gonna, they had all this computing horsepower and never, but wasn’t being used consistently. And what if we just like, share, you know, sell some, swipe a credit card and we’ll share some timeshare on it. Uh, this little company called AWS incredible and so I’m really privileged to have AWS join us as a sponsor this year.

[00:01:32 ] Vince Menzione: Um, and just I think it gives the world a much more well-rounded view of what we’re seeing in our world of ecosystems as well. And I would love to invite to join me up on stage. Mike Levy from AWS Mike is nearby somewhere. Here he comes. Uh, so, so great to have you, Mike. Join us. Thank you so much for joining us.

[00:01:54 ] Vince Menzione: Absolutely. Um, and then also we’re gonna have, we’re gonna have some really good conversation today. So I want to, you have the distinction of being the very first AWS guest and an ultimate partner event. Hopefully not the last It’s an honor.

[00:02:05 ] Michael Levy: Yeah. First, uh, first of many, hopefully.

[00:02:07 ] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Well, great to have you.

[00:02:08 ] Vince Menzione: Uh, we got to meet recently and we’re, and, and we’re also gonna be joined by a partner, uh, in a little bit here. So, uh, John Yo is a good friend of ours and he is also gonna be up on, on with this as well. But I thought we’d spend a few minutes because you are up on stage this summer, in fact, and really carrying the message.

[00:02:26 ] Vince Menzione: We be, we talk about marketplaces and it’s incredible world, world of mar marketplaces and AWS really led the, the fold on this, right? Because coming from the pedigree of retail and all the automation that AWS had. You were the first to market with marketplace, and you’ve also been an incredible innovator.

[00:02:43 ] Vince Menzione: So I thought we spent a little time, I wanna give you a little time to talk about that, if you don’t mind.

[00:02:47 ] Jon Yoo: Absolutely.

[00:02:47 ] Vince Menzione: And I can stay up here with you or give you a couple minutes alone if you like. Yeah, we can have a seat. That’s fine. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let’s,

[00:02:52 ] Michael Levy: let’s

[00:02:52 ] Vince Menzione: sit down and talk.

[00:02:53 ] Michael Levy: Happy to. Um, so yeah, so for those who don’t know me, Mike Levy from the AWS Marketplace Team, um, and as Vince was referring to this summer, we launched, uh, an extension of AWS marketplace.

[00:03:04 ] Michael Levy: Which is AI agents and tools in marketplace. So first I wanna say thank you to, to Vince for having us as a sponsor, uh, and to the incredible community that you built here. It’s, thank you. It’s really super impressive. Thank you. And we’re very glad to be a part of it now. Um, and second, I want to thank all the partners in the room, a number of which were part of that launch of AI agents and tools in marketplace.

[00:03:24 ] Michael Levy: And I think the big thing for us and importantly for our mutual customers is really launching a comprehensive strategy when we say AI agents and tools. We really mean AI agents and tools, because I think we all know in this market, many of our enterprise customers or even startup customers, you’re not just buying an a w you know, you’re not buying an AI agent off the shelf and just setting it free in your production environment.

[00:03:47 ] Michael Levy: Um, and so it’s really the, the tools aspect that’s an important part of the launch for us, um, and really a comprehensive offering. Of kind of, regardless of where a company is on their Ag agent AI journey, the idea is that there’s something for them in marketplace that they can procure and use in, in their own business.

[00:04:04 ] Vince Menzione: So tell us more about that. Take, take us down another level or, or step within that conversation. Yeah, so we’ll

[00:04:09 ] Michael Levy: double click. So the, the launch was big and we’ve seen a lot of momentum since then. Uh, but we had over 900 listings in marketplace. Uh, and that really runs the gamut. So there are off the shelf AI agents that you can take.

[00:04:22 ] Michael Levy: Procure, uh, and deploy through marketplace and through AWS. And there’s, uh, things in between, like agent development platforms, think Salesforce agent force, uh, LR writer, some of these newer companies that are really focusing on this space and how to help enterprises really transform and become agentic, um, or develop their own ai.

[00:04:42 ] Michael Levy:</stro