AWS launches a new AI Competency focused on agentic AI that provides rich partner benefits including new funding, marketing and AWS internal sales resources.
AWS has unveiled a new AI Competency that focuses on agentic AI, offering rich benefits to partners that achieve the new competency, including funding and AWS resources.
“In a noisy AI market, customers want partners who can actually deliver,” said Randall Hunt, CTO of Caylent, which has already achieved the competency. “This competency helps customers find partners with a proven AI track record of results.”
AWS is investing heavily in partners that obtain its new AI Competency, which includes three agentic AI categories that a partner can obtain: Agentic AI Applications, Agentic AI Tools and Agentic AI Consulting Services.
Julia Chen, who leads AWS’ partner programs, said partners that achieve an AI Competency not only receive AWS’ stamp of approval that proves to customers they can successfully complete AI projects, but new funding, resources and marketing as well.
“They also get marketing development funds and access to some of our newest pilots,” Chen, vice president of Specialists and Partner Core, told CRN.
“Those who get the competency also get inclusion into our marketing campaigns, like we will talk about them on stage, we put them in catalogs, etc. So when we’re launching new initiatives or programs or go-to-market, etc., they get first dibs on those as well,” she said.
In addition, partners that obtain any of the three categories of the AI Competency will be highlighted inside AWS’ internal sales teams.
“It’s not just recognition among our customer base, it’s also recognition among the AWS sales team to go pull in these partners sometimes when they need a partner in the sale with them,” Chen said.
‘In A Noisy AI Market, Customers Want Partners Who Can Actually Deliver,’ Says AWS Partner
AWS already has 35 partners that have attained the new AI Competency, including some of the company’s leading partners like Accenture, AllCloud, Capgemini, PwC and Caylent.
Caylent’s Hunt said the new AI Competency isn’t easy for partners to obtain as AWS conducts a rigorous evidence-based third-party review of a partner’s ability to design and operate enterprise AI systems on AWS.
“Achieving the new AWS AI Competency is a real advantage for customers. It proves we are delivering production-grade AI and agentic systems on AWS, not just experimenting,” he said.
“It also gives us priority access to programs like the GenAI Innovation Center and ISV Pods, which deepens our partnership with AWS by letting us work alongside AWS GenAI SAs that lets us move faster with customers and bring new capabilities to market much earlier,” Hunt said.
AI projects that have an AI Competency partner attached on average launch 30 days faster than projects that do not, according to AWS.
AWS’ New Agentic AI Competencies
AWS previously had a Generative AI Competency.
The company is now evolving the Generative AI Competency into its new AI Competency, which has three agentic AI categories for partners including Agentic AI Applications, Agentic AI Tools and Agentic AI Consulting Services.
These new categories recognize AWS partners that excel in developing and implementing sophisticated AI systems capable of perceiving environments, reasoning over goals, and taking purposeful actions with minimal human intervention.
“We take a lot of time, effort and pride in validating each one of the partners that applies for the competency and making sure that they’re actually very, very skilled at what they say they are. So these three are very important because these match up to the new things that we’re putting out in our portfolio,” said Chen.
Critically, she said partners that achieve an AI Competency have a 25 percent higher likelihood that their customer will move from AI proof of concept (POC) into production.
“We have all these customers that are sort of dabbling in AI—they’ll do a little like proof of concept project—but they won’t take it to production. So for us, that’s actually the most important thing, is that the partners are skilled enough that they can help increase the likelihood that a customer will take an AI project from a POC, all the way to production scale across their whole business,” said Chen.
AWS partners have collectively launched over 20,000 GenAI opportunities, with its leading partners seeing win rates of 70 percent or higher, she said.
AWS AI Portfolio Is ‘Exploding Right Now’
The AWS AI Competency designation represents the highest level of validation for partners working with autonomous AI systems.
Partners undergo rigorous technical assessment and must demonstrate successful customer implementations that align with AWS’ commitment to responsible AI development.
The other partners that have achieved the new competency includes Adastra, Ascending, Automation Anywhere, CompassUOL, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Deloitte, DoiT, Dynatrace, Genpact, Glean, IBM, ICS, Informatica, Karini AI, Langchain, LG CNS, Loka, Lyzr, MegaZone Cloud, Mission, Neo4J, New Math Data, Publicis Sapient, Reply, Snowflake, Weights & Biases, Writer, Zilliz and Zscaler.
“The competencies matter because we did a study ourselves, and we find that 87 percent of customers actually take into account these partner competencies when they’re picking which partners to use,” Chen said. “Our GenAI and agentic AI portfolio is exploding right now. So we’re very excited to launch this.”
AWS re:Invent 2025 takes place this week in Las Vegas.
