AWS Partners See Surge in AI Agents Demand for 2026

Demand for AWS AI agents is accelerating in 2026, reshaping how enterprises buy technology and how partners deliver services. 

Executives from AWS, Mission Cloud, and Genpact say customers are moving quickly from experimentation to scaled deployment — often under board-level pressure to demonstrate AI-driven outcomes.

AWS Marketplace search activity for agentic AI tools has increased significantly over the past year, according to Matt Yanchyshyn, VP of AWS Marketplace and Partner Services. 

At the same time, partners report that enterprises are underestimating the foundational data, infrastructure, and process transformation required to support AI agents in production environments.

How AI agent demand is changing enterprise expectations for AWS partners

The demand for AI technology has forced channel partners to ajdust how they approach customers, particularly those who require foundational data and infrastructure work before they can realize ROI on AI investments.

“Mission has had to change, too. We have had to approach the world in a different way, and the conversations we’ve had with our customers have changed, too,” Mission Cloud CTO Jonathan LeCour told Channel Insider.

The importance of AI adoption to board directors and other top executives is putting pressure on IT-focused leaders to quickly scale AI investments. 

Yanchyshyn said search queries on the AWS Marketplace for agentic tooling have increased substantially since last year, when the company created an agent-focused category within the buying experience, as have searches for vertical-specific AI-enabled tooling relevant to specific workflows.

“We’re seeing a big step change in difference in customer demand for Agentic and AI technologies and purchasing them through a marketplace motion,” Yanchyshyn added.

To many partners, that demand is impacting the ability for organizations to prepare accordingly before execution.

“Because it’s a board-level directive and because it’s in the news … people are focused on progress, and defining the how and what as fast as possible, but they’re forgetting how important the foundation is to that success,” Matthew Arellano, SVP at Genpact, told us. 

“To me it’s really moved to the speed of outcomes because the board is pressing and because people are asking how fast we can make this step change, and it’s sometimes absent of the fact that we need to solidify the foundation,” Arellano continued.

Agentic AI projects accelerate demand for consulting and transformation services

As businesses realize how much work is required to prepare their infrastructure and data environments for agentic AI technologies, they are turning to their channel partners for strategic advising about not just technology, but business transformation at scale.

LeCour says the need has shifted the way Mission approaches conversations with clients and ultimately means discussions are more business process-focused than ever before.

“We aren’t your business, and we can’t find your business problems on our own. We need you to do that and then we can help you from there,” LeCour said.

“We have to be deeply consultative more at a business level than ever before,” he continued. “Now the goal [from customers] is ‘we have to be more efficient’ and then we need to learn about their business processes and discover where things can be different.”

“We’re a process-first company,” Arrelano said. “When someone’s coming to us, they’re coming to solve a business problem that we’re going to enable with and for them.”

The need for process-focused consulting is supported by AWS Marketplace data, according to Yanchyshyn, who emphasized how specific agent queries are becoming on the marketplace.

“AI has gone through the roof … people are not just looking for generative AI, they’re looking for what is my specific healthcare problem or financial services problem or just workflow problem that I want to solve with an agent, and that’s a total difference that we’re actually seeing reflected in actual search metrics and the terms that people are using,” Yanchyshyn said.

AWS Marketplace adapts procurement strategy for AI agents and partner growth

None of these business outcomes are accomplished if companies (and their partners) can’t procure the technology itself. As AWS partners, LeCour and Arrelano both rely on the hyperscaler’s support across the tech stack.

To AWS, procurement trends align with agentic AI demand to fuel a renewed interest in seamless and efficient buying experiences.

“It’s like this whole generation of people who grew up on their iPhones who want to have immediate access or this generation now who need immediate access to like AI yesterday and they want to iterate an experiment on tools, they can’t wait, either,” Yanchyshyn said. 

“They’re looking to tools that allow them to both do due diligence faster and ultimately procure faster and, and not necessarily with talking to a human. So that’s sort of driven this re-rise in self-service that you see reflected in our roadmap.”

Yanchyshyn also sees an evolution in who exactly within a business wants to leverage emerging technology. As AI use cases come to every role and function within an organization, procurement teams are now fielding requests from sales, legal, marketing, and other teams more frequently.

“The kind of person showing up to buy these things is not just a software developer, and these people are also taking advantage of AI and agents,” Yanchyshyn said. 

“So you don’t need to be like a super high tech AI specialist to use this stuff, and that’s exciting too, because we’re literally hitting a broader audience, which explains the adoption trends we’re seeing,” he added.

How Genpact and Mission Cloud scale AI agent adoption with AWS

LeCour and Arellano point to technical capabilities as a key driver in ultimately providing end-user customers with the services they need.

“For me it is about easing that adoption, taking away that fear and enabling people to be heroes,” LeCour said.

“With things like Bedrock and AgentCore, we get optionality of the models that we use. If you think about undifferentiated heavy lifting and the models, now we just need to figure out how we orchestrate it for clients,” Arellano said. “We’re seeing less brittleness in enterprise architecture because of our partnership and that’s why we’re doubling down.”

AWS partners expect AI agent demand to accelerate through 2026

If there is one thing virtually everyone agrees on, it’s that we are far from the end of the cycle of change AI technology has prompted. 

As the evolution continues, both LeCour and Arellano expect business shifts to continue to adapt to customer needs and partner opportunities.

“This is a fundamental shift … and an entirely new way of working,” LeCour said. “We kind of have to look back at cloud and remember what that looked like. Consumption-based infrastructure services, moving from a CapEx model to an OpEx model, we’ve been talking about cloud transformation for years and we’re still doing it. We’re nowhere near ‘boring’ yet on the AI front.”

To Arellano, that also means customers are rethinking their budgets, especially where SaaS applications are concerned. That trend is bringing a new wave of opportunities to partner businesses like Genepact.

“You’re starting to see this buy vs build conversation come back again,” Arellano said. “The question becomes are companies truly operators or technology companies, but that’s where we slot in. We’re taking this shape of operations company, technology company, and ISV. We’re very much becoming a builder.”