In a keynote address from re:Invent, McKinsey & Company's Lareina Yee shares fascinating data, trends and best practices on AI adoption, the future of skillsets, and leadership insights that are needed for AI transformation at scale.

Topics Include:

• Over 80% of companies have adopted AI in at least one business function currently.
• Despite heavy investment, 62% of companies remain in experimental or pilot phases with AI.
• Only 7% of organizations have achieved full-scale AI implementation, up from 2% earlier this year.
• Agentic AI has proliferated rapidly across functions from knowledge management to manufacturing in one year.
• Between 45% and 5% of companies have implemented AI agents across different business functions today.
• AI's productivity potential represents $4.4 trillion in economic value beyond just cost savings opportunities.
• Innovation ranks as the number one goal for AI investments, ahead of cost reduction priorities.
• Employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and competitive differentiation drive AI adoption alongside revenue growth and cost.
• High AI performers view implementation as total enterprise transformation, not just technology deployment projects.
• Leading companies spend 4.9 times more budget on AI investments compared to average performing organizations.
• Traditional software stacks evolved to SaaS, now transforming into AI-ready tech stacks within one generation.
• Job outlook remains mixed: 32% expect losses, 13% expect increases, 43% see no major change.
• Since 2023, significant skill shifts show increased demand for software development and business intelligence capabilities.
• AI fluency has increased seven times as the most sought-after skill across all job types.
• AI fluency means using AI in everyday work, not building models or creating large language models.
• Skills like driving records, coaching, customer service, and management remain harder to automate with current AI.
• Transactional, data-driven repetitive tasks like inventory management and invoicing face highest automation exposure currently.
• Historical technology revolutions like electricity created six to eight jobs for every one job displaced.
• New roles like prompt engineering emerge, requiring skills like effective questioning rather than technical coding.

Participants:

• Lareina Yee - Director of Technology Research, McKinsey & Company

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AWS Principal Solutions Architect Wallace Printz explains how agents are reshaping SaaS business models, pricing strategies, and technical architectures.

Topics Include:

• Wallace Printz discusses agentic workloads transforming SaaS with largest AWS customers
• New interaction models include generative UI, voice agents, and proactive work
• Agents extending SaaS products to interact with external systems and businesses
• Virtual teammates enabling cross-department collaboration and upskilling non-expert users effectively
• Monetization strategies evolving as predictable costs become variable with agents
• Three patterns: dedicated agents, shared agents, and multi-tenant personalized agents
• Multi-tenant agents enable hyper-personalized experiences using individual tenant context enrichment
• Agent-centric business strategy requires real assessment beyond AI hype cycle
• Agent orchestration complexity grows with multiple specialized agents interacting together
• Tenant isolation requires JWT tokens and AWS Bedrock Agent Core identity
• Cost-per-tenant management needs LLM throttling, tiering, and unified control plane
• Multi-tenancy creates sticky personalized experiences; AWS white paper releasing soon

Participants:

• Wallace Printz - Principal Solution Architect, Amazon Web Services

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Industry leaders from Boomi, Demandbase and Smarsh share hard-won lessons on balancing AI creativity with guardrails, why data quality trumps frameworks, and deploying AI at scale.

Topics Include:

• Three industry leaders share experiences building AI solutions at Boomi, Demandbase, and Smarsh.
• Smarsh manages trillion communications for financial services, detecting bad actors across multiple channels.
• Boomi built agent studio, garden, and control tower while spawning 33,000 internal agents.
• Chris Timmerman used vibe coding to build embeddable Boomi in five months solo.
• Companies balance creativity with guardrails, starting with IT policies before unleashing innovation.
• Internal adoption driven by empowering teams to build their own solutions versus top-down.
• Demandbase saw 70% adoption within six months through grassroots approach and local champions.
• Measuring success proves challenging, comparable to tracking Excel usage rather than specific KPIs.
• Companies focus on outcomes like touch-free bug fixes and support metrics versus raw usage.
• Biggest lesson: Data quality and context determine success more than agentic frameworks.
• Need scaling framework from low-risk UX improvements to high-risk automation with appropriate guardrails.
• Industry created fatigue by overpromising; should have started smaller with realistic expectations.

Participants:

• Chris Timmerman – Vice President, Global Services Delivery, Boomi
• Harshal Dedhia – Vice President of AI, Demandbase
• Brandon Carl - Executive Vice President of AI and Product Strategy, Smarsh
• Allison Johnson - AMER Technology Partnerships Leader, Amazon Web Services

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/

Phill Robinson of Boardwave joins Miguel Alava and Massimo Ghislandi of AWS to share research and actionable strategies for European software companies using cloud infrastructure, AI features, and marketplace leverage to drive unprecedented growth.

Topics Include:

• Boardwave and AWS reveal research on European software companies becoming global innovators.
• Cloud-first businesses exceed customer expectations at 60% versus 46% for laggards.
• Boardwave's 2,500 CEO members validate findings: AI companies growing 45% annually.
• Leaders excel at gathering customer feedback for innovation and implementing AI.
• Top performers leverage marketplaces and deliver continuous customer experience updates consistently.
• Cloud adoption is foundational for generative AI and agentic AI to scale.
• Companies face different challenges depending on their cloud maturity stage currently.
• Cloud serves as table stakes before companies can capture AI growth opportunities.
• Benchmarking tool helps identify current position and plan strategic next steps forward.
• Startups should solve universal problems globally, building painkillers not vitamin products.
• Intercom scales customer service; Wix transforms efficiency through cultural and engineering mindset.
• Future requires cloud foundation with AI features; AWS offers comprehensive support programs.

Participants:

• Phill Robinson – Chair & Co-Founder, Boardwave
• Miguel Alava – EMEA ISV General Manager, Amazon Web Services
• Massimo Ghislandi - Head of EMEA Marketing for Software Companies, Amazon Web Services

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/

Industry leaders from Kore AI, SS&C Blue Prism and AWS reveal what actually works in agentic AI deployment, from contact center automation to employee productivity, with proven strategies for regulated industries.

Topics Include:

• Kore AI and SS&C Blue Prism leaders discuss achievable agentic AI actions
• Three deployment areas show real ROI: customer service, employee automation, and process workflows
• Kore AI handles billions of annual interactions, with 85% focused on contact center operations
• SS&C Blue Prism achieved $200 million annual savings using agentic AI across 120 internal use cases
• The company processes 6 million transactions monthly consuming 10-12 billion tokens in production
• Regulated industries like financial services and healthcare successfully deploy agentic AI with proper guardrails
• eBay case study demonstrates measurable productivity gains tied directly to AI agent implementation
• Two identical pilot programs yielded different results: one tied to business outcomes, one didn't
• ISVs should stop chasing shiny objects and focus on solving customers' stickiest problems instead
• Design for scale from day one and accept no single vendor solves everything alone
• Employee-facing use cases carry less risk than customer-facing applications for initial AI deployments
• Combining deterministic automation with AI plus governance creates more viable and trustworthy solutions

Participants:

• Erik Walton - EVP of WW Sales/Partner Sales, Kore AI
• Satish Shenoy - VP, Global Technology Alliances & AI GTM, SS&C Blue Prism
• Arym Diamond – Head of North America Data & AI Sales, Amazon Web Services

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/

CEO Scott Stephenson explains how Deepgram's voice AI technology powers everything from pharmacies to drive-thru ordering and why, after so many years, Voice AI is now ready for prime time.

Topics Include:

• Scott Stephenson introduces Deepgram as an audio AI company building speech products
• Major brands like CVS and Anthropic use Deepgram to power voice agents
• CVS handles prescription status calls where 25-40% ask if prescriptions are ready
• Voice technology now accurately understands diverse accents and speech patterns from callers
• Automated systems free pharmacists to focus on their actual jobs instead
• Jack in the Box uses Deepgram for drive-thru ordering with natural conversations
• Previous McDonald's and Wendy's failures happened because the technology wasn't ready yet
• Voice AI can handle any task with text input like CRM notes
• Healthcare companies adopted voice AI faster than expected despite compliance hurdles
• Staffing shortages drove hospitals to push through HIPAA and regulatory red tape
• First misconception: AI will never match human performance in customer interactions
• Second misconception: one product should solve all voice-related business problems
• Companies must strategically decide what to build, partner on, or buy
• Deepgram's research team controls speech speed and outputs conversational data like timestamps
• Adoption will feel slow initially but suddenly be everywhere within three years

Participants:

• Scott Stephenson – Co-Founder & CEO, Deepgram

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/

** AWS re:Invent 2025 Dec 1-5, Las Vegas - Register Here! **

Uri Cohen reveals how Elastic transformed from managing 50,000 complex clusters to building a seamless serverless platform that eliminates operational overhead while scaling globally

Topics Include:

• Johan Broman of AWS hosts Uri Cohen who leads Elastic's platform products team
• Uri shares his nine-year journey at Elastic from small company to global scale
• Elasticsearch started 15 years ago, becoming popular for search, logs, and security events
• Elastic Cloud launched 2015, but users struggled with shards, nodes, and infrastructure complexity
• Serverless eliminates operational concerns, letting users just ingest and analyze their data
• Design goal: maintain familiar Elasticsearch experience while removing all infrastructure management burden
• Chose complete architectural redesign over retrofitting auto-scaling to existing infrastructure
• New architecture uses S3 persistence with lightweight routing layer serving 50,000+ clusters
• Cell-based design limits blast radius and improves multi-tenancy across 40+ global regions
• Learned S3 API costs can explode unexpectedly without careful request pattern optimization
• AI transforms security workflows: 10,000 alerts become 3 actionable attack summaries automatically
• Weekly continuous deployment enables faster innovation delivery without waiting for version releases

Participants:

• Uri Cohen – Vice President of Product Management, Platform, Elastic
• Johan Broman – EMEA ISV Head of Solutions Architecture, Amazon Web Services

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/

SS&C Blue Prism's VP reveals how they achieved $200M annual savings and $600M revenue growth by deploying 3,000 AI agents, processing 6 million documents monthly as their own first customer.

Topics Include:

• SS&C Blue Prism evolved from RPA leader to agentic automation provider over 25 years
• Serves 22,000 clients in regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail
• Offers AI agents, governance gateway, and secure enterprise chat leveraging AWS Bedrock
• As "customer zero," they deployed 3,000 agents processing 6 million documents monthly
• Generated $200M annual savings and $600M revenue growth using their own technology
• Financial services client unlocked unstructured document processing previously impossible with traditional automation
• Healthcare client's AI processes MRIs more accurately than human radiologists
• Key lesson: Focus on business outcomes first, not just implementing AI everywhere
• Critical insight: Plan for scale on day one, not after pilots succeed
• AWS Marketplace streamlined purchasing, especially in challenging Latin American markets
• Future vision: B2A economy where agents negotiate parking, shopping, and services autonomously
• Predicts agent-to-agent communication will revolutionize healthcare monitoring and wealth management

Participants:

• Satish Shenoy – Global Vice President, Technology Alliances and GenAI GTM, SS&C Blue Prism

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/