AWS, OpenAI Building AI Agents That Run For Years With ‘Elastic Pricing:’ AWS AI Chief
‘We expect that agents are going to run for hours, days, weeks, years, and are going to increasingly become much more like an elastic resource,’ AWS AI chief Matt Wood tells CRN.
“We partnered with OpenAI on model training, and we got a deep partnership and ongoing engineering project with them in building a next-generation harness for fully managed agents,” said Wood, chief AI and technology officer for AWS.
“So we expect that agents are going to run for hours, days, weeks, years, and are going to increasingly become much more like an elastic resource,” he said.
“Whereas, instead of having a large agent which tries to do a bit of everything, we see more and more smaller, composable specialized agents which are fully managed and which have a very, very low marginal cost and which you only pay for as and when you use them,” Wood explained.
[Related: AWS AI Chief: Why AWS Bests Microsoft And Google For Channel Partners In AI Era]
OpenAI and AWS formed a tighter partnership in 2026 by combining AWS infrastructure, services and solutions with OpenAI’s latest models and innovation.
AI Agents With ‘Elastic Pricing And Composable Connectivity’
By bringing together the best of OpenAI’s models and AWS infrastructure—as well as AWS’ experience with developers and managed services—the two companies are creating “a set of fully managed agents which are designed to have very, very low marginal cost and to run for very long periods of time with elastic pricing and composable connectivity,” Wood said.
“That enables you to bring lots of different agents together and to have one agent per task, or per employee or per customer or per AWS resource or per transaction,” he said.
Wood said there isn’t a limit on how specialized an individual agent can become.
The goal is to bring this new wave of agentic AI technology to more developers as quickly as possible.
“It’ll be a transformative new way of delivering very long-running agents in an elastic fashion, bringing the best of our knowledge of elasticity with the best of OpenAI’s models to AWS,” Wood said.
‘There’s Going To Be Millions Of Agents Running In Any Large Enterprise’
AWS channel partner Inituitive.AI is bullish about OpenAI and AWS’ agentic strategy as customers are seeking AI adoption at a rapid pace.
“There’s going to be millions of agents running in any large enterprise in a given day, given moment, nonpersistent agents will come up, go down—that adoption is going to happen from business users, not from technology teams,” said Inituitive.AI CEO and founder Jay Modh.
Modh said there’s a long list of frontier AI models in the market, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini.
“So multimodal, multi-agentic, AI governance and orchestration platforms are the only way AI adoption is going to happen at scale,” he said. “AWS opening up to OpenAI in a large way is greatly beneficial.”
‘Huge Potential For AWS’
Modh said OpenAI has been adopted by many businesses who are now familiar and skilled on the technology.
“OpenAI’s adoption so far largely has been through Microsoft Copilot stack,” he said.
“Now, customers are familiar with OpenAI. They have created the controls and guardrails around OpenAI that AWS is going to unlock value and say, ‘Hey, by the way, for your business AI or enterprise AI, the same OpenAI that you are using through [Microsoft] M365— you can leverage it on this side of the world [AWS] as well.’”
Modh said the OpenAI and AWS AI partnership and strategy is something he and his customers can bet on.
“It’s very well aligned to something that we believe truly, which is: the world is going to be open ecosystem, multimodal, multi-agentic,” said Modh. “And this unlocks a huge potential for AWS.”
Wood, for his part, said AWS will continue to bring the latest and greatest OpenAI models on its AI infrastructure and platforms like Amazon Bedrock.
“Making those models available inside a secure, private environment allows our customers to be able to run agents which are increasingly working with more sensitive data, whilst retaining and actually raising the bar on customers’ expectations when it comes to security and privacy for artificial intelligence workloads,” Wood said.
For Q2 2026, AWS generated $42.2 billion in total revenue, representing an increase of 37 percent year over year. This marked AWS’ highest growth rate in 18 quarters.
AWS currently has a $169 billion annual run rate.