Vineet Anshuman: Building the Future of AI and Security on AWS Marketplace

[00:00:38] Chip Rodgers: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Inside Partnering. Gosh, I'm so excited to be joined today by Vineet Anshuman. Vineet. Welcome.

[00:00:48] Vineet Anshuman: Thanks so much, Chip. So great to see you again and super excited to be here.

[00:00:53] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Yeah. So by way of introduction for Vineet. Your role, your title [00:01:00] is actually a long one. But it's focused on security and AI for AWS worldwide leader for all, for partners in AWS marketplace. Did I capture that

[00:01:13] Vineet Anshuman: Yep. My, my focus is mostly on my. But yeah, I do work with, partners across the globe for sure. You got it. Spot on Chip and I know it it's pretty heavy, but it's aligned with the market momentum right now with everything touching AI and security. It's super, super interesting place to.

[00:01:31] Chip Rodgers: Absolutely. It's the hot, it's the hot place to be for sure. So, vi Vineet has, three years with AWS background with Persistent Systems, Tata Communications for 10 years Vodafone Info Infosys and number of technology. Leaders and currently you're actually going through a program with Carnegie Mellon, around AI.

[00:01:54] Chip Rodgers: So really interesting background also with Stanford Business School around [00:02:00] AI. So you've been in the AI space for quite a bit, vi.

[00:02:04] Vineet Anshuman: Yeah, no, I think it's kind of good coincidence. I didn't definitely planning that way. I've touched multiple elements. Of infrastructure which are ultimately, AB is supporting all the momentum around AI build, right? I mean, if you think about AI there's a lot of buzz upon what is being built.

[00:02:20] Vineet Anshuman: But it's also about how infrastructure is ready in terms of, being able to make that reality. So I'm super proud to be part of my infrastructure domain over many decades now. And it's evolved over a bit of time. And thankfully I've been there in the right place at the right time, which, I think makes me talk to great people like you.

[00:02:41] Chip Rodgers: Well, it's exciting. It's a hot topic for AWS partners, whether they're AWS partners or thinking about becoming an AWS partner around the AI topic and agentic and just really, there's so much going on. AWS is doing so many things. So that's what we're gonna dive into, I think.[00:03:00]

[00:03:00] Chip Rodgers: Vineet, maybe start with, just talk a little bit about what you and your team are up to today. At AWS with partners,

[00:03:09] Vineet Anshuman: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think, my, my team is responsible for, partnership, motion, respect to, security partners. And these are, top tier partners of AWS where we work very closely with them in terms of not only providing, I would say state of art, next gen modernized security offerings, but also, working very closely with them in terms of defining.

[00:03:32] Vineet Anshuman: What will be the next relevant solution in terms of security? Right. And when you talk about security AI is a big component in terms of how, we have VC security. I mean, we call it as a three leg tool, AI for security for AI. And then of course, how do you have security from, threats coming from AI.

[00:03:47] Vineet Anshuman: So, it's very cool to our offering. It's a, day zero thing for us. And we are super, super excited. That we could work with very, I would say strategic partners and impact such a massive adoption of [00:04:00] technology through interworking and integration work that we do with them. So we are responsible ultimately coil, co-sell, and then co-market with all these ISV that we work very closely with.

[00:04:09] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. And there's so much opportunity there on, on all three of those fronts. Let's let's dive into it. I think you've talked Vineet about some really interesting statistics that talk about the market opportunity. I mean, I think there's so much investment in. AI today, ag agentic but it's because there's a huge opportunity out there.

[00:04:30] Chip Rodgers: What are you seeing, what's, what are you hearing about the market for ISVs in this space?

[00:04:37] Vineet Anshuman: Yeah, I think if you see from the evolution standpoint, 2023, we have seen respect to AI, especially we have seen ISVs doing a lot of POCs. They were countless POCs that we are working very closely with a lot of our ISVs on. 24 became, I would say a year where, we started seeing a lot of production based deployments happening where, partners were embedding their core product offerings, [00:05:00] leveraging gen AI and a lot of these offerings of course infrastructure from AWS.

[00:05:04] Vineet Anshuman: And as we enter into 2025. We have also interned an era which is called as Agentic AI right? As you're aware. And, we're seeing ISVs creating autonomous AI capabilities with their software solutions, right? So what is fascinating is like how soon things have picked up.

[00:05:24] Vineet Anshuman: It seems like, all this happened as of yesterday. While, technology is still evolving, but,

[00:05:29] Chip Rodgers: isn't it? It's so fast.

[00:05:31] Vineet Anshuman: Insane.

[00:05:32] Chip Rodgers: Every month or six weeks, it's like completely changed.

[00:05:36] Vineet Anshuman: Totally. So in terms of the opportunity size, we are talking of $280 billion plus kind of opportunity for security partners. And what makes it interesting is 95% of the opportunity will flow through partnership. That's the reason we are still bullish in terms of, what we're seeing with our partners, we are seeing a massive paradigm shift of how partners are em embedding AI as part of their core platform, [00:06:00] right?

[00:06:00] Vineet Anshuman: So, all this work put together are, are impacting I would say customer engagement are creating expanded market opportunities and then really I would say transforming. The entire cloud revolution in its own way.

[00:06:19] Chip Rodgers: 95%. That's incredible.

[00:06:22] Vineet Anshuman: Yes it's that's the reality. I can throw some more stats for you if you just want to, know how much agentic AI has picked up and how some of the markets analyst sees it, see them. For example, Gartner says that one third of the enterprise software applications include agentic AI by 2028, right?

[00:06:40] Vineet Anshuman: So. So it, it kind of, there's another step that says that it's 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomous a autonomously through AI agents. So it is, it's just not about what's gonna happen, but it's just happening right now, right here in front of us.

[00:06:58] Chip Rodgers: So [00:07:00] talking about partners, I think let's stick with that theme of, co build, co-market, co-sell. And talk a little bit about the co build side. AWS has some incredible, core technologies and resources for partners. Talk a little bit about what that what those are and how partners can can take advantage.

[00:07:20] Vineet Anshuman: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think we have entire stack from infrastructure to. Bedrock where you can, access multiple, LLMs we have applications and agents built on top of that. We recently announced Agent Marketplace, and I would love to talk more about it. And then of course, applications built on top of that, right?

[00:07:38] Vineet Anshuman: So, in essence, from partner standpoint, we have everything that you need. We've got ready to use applications. Think of Amazon Q. We just launched Transform. And then some of these capabilities respect to agentic AI and tools. Bedrock I think, has been in the market long enough for people to know about it pretty decently. It gives you flexible deployment [00:08:00] models and access to your model of choice which I've seen something our partners love to work on. then we came up with a newly launched Agent Core capability to basically help with the agent, TKI, kind of framework to, build and scale agentic AI, which again, we'll love to talk more about it.

[00:08:18] Vineet Anshuman: So, and then of course, at the bottom of the layer we have got infrastructure, we've got Amazon, SageMaker and then we've got our own compute with our chips at tri in French and then GPUs around that. So we spoke about a layer, basically from infrastructure to, s to, agentic AI including our marketplace story.

[00:08:36] Vineet Anshuman: And then of course the applications like Amazon Q and everything related to, I would say adoption from the end customer standpoint.

[00:08:44] Chip Rodgers: So a lot of build going on. Reinvent is coming up. It's gonna be here fast, I'm sure it's gonna be, it's always packed with partners showing what they built on AWS very exciting.[00:09:00]

[00:09:01] Vineet Anshuman: Yeah, and it's a, it is a very exciting opportunity and timing, I would say for our partners, right? So we have seen the deal sizes growing significantly with whole AI infusion. We have seen the sales cycles becoming shorter with AWS marketplace and the future launches that you have done to help our partners to take their offerings faster to the market.

[00:09:21] Vineet Anshuman: We have seen the enterprise customers now making bigger commitments when they do these, deals through marketplace. And then most importantly, we have seen much stronger customer retention, which is what our partners love and care about the most. So in a sense AWS offers, this immense value for our partners through marketplace and a lot of agentic AI and, overall AI ecosystem infrastructure, including which has been super crucial factor in terms of helping them win more and more customers, but at the same time helping retain more customers, expand their revenue overall. So that's a big part of what we do is [00:10:00] within AWS.

[00:10:03] Chip Rodgers: So let's talk about the about marketplace. I think there's so many benefits for partners to be working with marketplace. When their solutions are transactable, it unlocks a lot of incentives. It unlocks the opportunity to leverage, pre-commit dollars and things like that.

[00:10:26] Chip Rodgers: But earlier this year, Matt made the announcement about the agentic marketplace. I think initially we're like right off the bat, 900 partners were, co announcing. Tell us a little bit about that, where that stands today. And and I know there's tremendous growth.

[00:10:44] Vineet Anshuman: Yeah, no, I think from the agentic AI marketplace perspective, it's been a massive interest area ever since we launch. We, and I would say pre-launched it in New York Summit this year. So that's been I would say very interesting to our partners. What we have [00:11:00] seen a lot of partners, actually from the agent pers from the agentic AI perspective, I think it gives ability for our partners to basically host their agents on the marketplace, just the way they have been hosting their applications and makes it super seamless in terms of being able to offer these agent capabilities through the marketplace.

[00:11:16] Vineet Anshuman: Now. And the best part is we have not just left it there. I think there are elements which are tied to this in terms of making it easier to build and scale the agents. And we did announce a capability called Agent Core, which is actually at the heart of it in terms of making it ever more impactful for our partners to work upon.

[00:11:34] Vineet Anshuman: So, happy to expand more on Agent Core. If that's an area, I won't go. Now go into, I mean, we have seen a lot of interest around that because, it's one thing to build agent but when you think about scaling motions, that's where, real set of challenges kind of come in. And with this Agent Core framework, you, we basically help to kind of, not only simplify that, but also, give you that flexibility and framework to build your agent seamlessly.[00:12:00]

[00:12:00] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about that. I think that's that is really interesting. And so what are the components of Agent Core?

[00:12:09] Vineet Anshuman: Yeah. So, if you think of Agent Core, basically, what we are looking at is, so let's kind of basically break it down in terms of. Why this agent code was launched, right? So basically, agent Core helps you to create AI agents that can understand the user request, right? So it breaks down a very complex task into logical, actionable steps.

[00:12:31] Vineet Anshuman: And then enable agents who use tools, APIs to complete those complex tasks, right? So that's the whole premise and purpose on which we launched it, right? And then the idea there was I think basically to have, your task and planning execution to be done through a framework it gives you seamless ability to go and integrate with foundational models because it's part of the bedrock ecosystem.

[00:12:54] Vineet Anshuman: It gives you access to tools and APIs, and then it gives you structured decision making, which is very [00:13:00] important for a complex agent ecosystem. Right. So that's the premise and the base foundation on which this was created. And I think this is basically back to our culture of working backwards at customer obsessiveness.

[00:13:12] Vineet Anshuman: So we heard from our customers in terms of what they would need to make their take. Offering successful, and we kind of curated pieces of that to basically give them ability to go and be able to launch some of these services seamlessly and do it in, in, in a more simpler way rather than having to waste engineering cycles on, simplifying this stuff on themselves. Right. So ultimately, the benefits that we deliver is one, we simplify agent de, development, right? We secondly provide a consistent reasoning framework which is something which the partners love because. This is one thing this, we have seen a lot of partners, especially in the early cycles, struggling with a lot.

[00:13:51] Vineet Anshuman: So that's an area where it really kind of helps them. It enables them to complex, really complex task and which is again, the scaling [00:14:00] factor, which I've been talking about. And then of course, it reduces the development and the complexity for whole agentic AI ecosystem. Right. So that's the whole premise.

[00:14:08] Vineet Anshuman: So, a lot of partners again, have been talking about it. And if you think about it Chip, I think different partners have different use cases. We have seen use cases around customer service automation. We have seen use cases around data analysis and reporting. We have seen use cases around task automation, business workflow processes, automation.

[00:14:28] Vineet Anshuman: So we have seen, depending on, the partner use case, the that option flavor is changing. But again, using the same framework that we offered across as part of the Agent Core Bedrock infrastructure.

[00:14:41] Chip Rodgers: So. That's terrific. And I can see where that not only simplifies the process for partners through their development process, but it also gives customers a roadmap and expectation about how things are gonna work. I would think it [00:15:00] also then helps with interoperability between solutions as well.

[00:15:05] Chip Rodgers: Yeah

[00:15:06] Vineet Anshuman: totally. I mean, that's a big part of what value the partners see being created from this. Because, the idea is that, we basically help you to build an agent from the start and then get it to production scale. Without having to spend too many cycles on, breaking down the complexities.

[00:15:25] Vineet Anshuman: So, so, so, if you think of a potential, idea where, you know, you wanna walk through some of these scenarios, I think we've seen typically partners going through. The POC cycle and then they work through the path of production, which could be challenging in terms of breaking down the performance parameter, understanding scalability, we have not even touched upon security.

[00:15:48] Vineet Anshuman: I think that's a big area I wanna talk about. Then there's a governance elements which is tied to it before you create anything meaningful as a business value with respect to AI production agents.

[00:15:59] Vineet Anshuman: [00:16:00] So

[00:16:00] Vineet Anshuman: that's, such as, which I'm talking about is, where Agent Core comes in and then simplifies some of these offerings, right?

[00:16:07] Vineet Anshuman: So, so, the ideas, again, one time to value, like how do you help, them create this seamlessly in, in the timely manner. Second, flexibility that you get to play around with the agents and the model of your choice. And then of course the whole trusted environment that we create with our security and scalable level infrastructure that, organizations can trust.

[00:16:28] Chip Rodgers: Where are you seeing the, because you're working with ISVs every day and so many have just really flocked to to AWS around some of the, these capabilities, these core capabilities that you've deployed. Where are you seeing some of the interesting solutions? Where's the heat? Is it, does it tend to be more around sort of horizontal solutions?

[00:16:51] Chip Rodgers: Are you seeing a lot of vertical vertical solutions coming to life? Both, all the above? Or what's, where's the what are you seeing?[00:17:00]

[00:17:00] Vineet Anshuman: That's a great question, Chip, because that's something I really wanted to touch upon because one of the things that when we look across our key industry verticals they, we see an incredible range of complex challenges. Which which our partners have to undergo to make their agentic offering successful.

[00:17:21] Vineet Anshuman: And, I think that's where the combination of agents from the marketplace and then Agent Core could really transformative across different industry segments. Right. I'll give you some examples here, right. So when you think of our agentic use cases across industries and we have, I think last couple of years we have been heavily focused on industry verticals, right?

[00:17:41] Vineet Anshuman: So you break it down on, based on industry verticals that you see, it could maybe, for example, for automotive, it could be AI powered development and validation, right? It could be a supply chain optimization. Right. That could be some of the use cases for PFSI as a vertical. It could be, say for [00:18:00] example, investment research assistant kind of, agent, or it could be a customer experience agent who could possibly help you solve, tons of your customer queries and enhance customer experience for manufacturing.

[00:18:12] Vineet Anshuman: It could be how do you do your day-to-day maintenance? Having that maintenance management. Or maybe, some kind of research and discovery work, right? In terms of your r and d, which I think is a big effort, which goes in manufacturing. Same with healthcare, where we are seeing massive traction.

[00:18:28] Vineet Anshuman: It could, again we can talk about clinical workflow automation. We can talk about patient and member engagement. Which again has picked up a lot of interest. And then media entertainment is another area where I think that's where I think we have seen a lot of multi agent collaboration work.

[00:18:44] Vineet Anshuman: Where you understand who can, agents who can understand a lot of videos and, multiple agents can collaborate with each other. We have seen campaign optimizations happening. We have seen advertising based on the sales data. So lot of it that we're talking as

[00:18:59] Chip Rodgers: You just covered everything [00:19:00] Vineet.

[00:19:00] Vineet Anshuman: Yeah, I mean, that's the gamut, right?

[00:19:02] Vineet Anshuman: I mean, because that's the scale at which we operate and we work with partners with all different server. And I mean, when we talk of ISVs, right? We have ISVs now working with us across industry verticals as part of our industry sprint initiative because we bring those specific sprints to drive adoption across the certain verticals.

[00:19:20] Vineet Anshuman: And then what we do is we. W for example, pick an ISV, understand their poor offering, create a differentiated layer on a certain vertical for that offering, and then power it with AWS ecosystem and field team to really make the impact. So the intent there is to, one, make it powerful. Second make it differentiated for a given vertical.

[00:19:42] Vineet Anshuman: And third to really, make sure that we have customers confidence because every industry vertical comes with its own nuance.

[00:19:48] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, its own nuances. And you also need to be really deep into those use cases to really understand how [00:20:00] it's, I mean, you need industry experts that are really gonna be able to kind of go toe to toe with customers to be able to identify the pain. Where's, where the opportunity's gonna, how the solution's gonna help where the challenges could be and all those things.

[00:20:17] Vineet Anshuman: Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, it's a good segue for us Chip to also talk about I would say security and how it is one of the key pillars

[00:20:26] Chip Rodgers: Yeah, I'd love to talk about

[00:20:28] Vineet Anshuman: because

[00:20:29] Vineet Anshuman: I know we, we met in the Partner Forum where we had a hundred plus security ISVs. Talking through the entire day on, how they are innovating with AWS and

[00:20:37] Chip Rodgers: what a great event.

[00:20:39] Vineet Anshuman: yeah, So thank you so much yeah, super proud to deliver that with the team. It was a very intense day, but it came out pretty well and I think we heard a lot from good customers and partners who were part of the event on how much they love the team and the fact that it's right element to areas where they're innovating and making impact, respect to their end customers.

[00:20:59] Chip Rodgers: [00:21:00] Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:01] Chip Rodgers: So let's do talk about that. What I think security is something that's top of mind for everybody. Because, AI is, there's so many potential challenges, right? It's it kind of gets into a lot of different things. It's a little bit of a black box. People are not quite sure how it all works.

[00:21:19] Vineet Anshuman: yep. Totally.

[00:21:21] Chip Rodgers: Even the people that built it are not quite sure, so, you know what, talk a little bit about about security and AI.

[00:21:28] Vineet Anshuman: No, totally. I think would love to spend a little time on that. Also respect to agentic AI like how, pivotal security is for that. So if you really see security is very important. And it's a foundation of lot of successful agent care deployment, right?

[00:21:45] Vineet Anshuman: So, so if you, for example, if you consider, responsible AI development it's basically the ethical compass on which every team member, developer, product manager really need to, understand the capability [00:22:00] and social implications to really make solutions, which are ethically safe and responsible.

[00:22:06] Vineet Anshuman: And we are big on that. We're really big on that because I think people talk about dangers of AI and everything around that. So we wanna make sure that everything that we are building is ethical and responsible from our perspective. And that also means that we conduct thorough risk assessment of each application.

[00:22:22] Vineet Anshuman: And, really measure the, consequences and impact and, that's how we drive responsible AI kind of architecture, right? So that's the foundational element for any security story. The next thing is, I think even before, AI became a thing respect to, I would say security.

[00:22:41] Vineet Anshuman: We had a shared responsibility model. Which I think we redefined it right now for AI as well now. So there's a shared responsibility model for AI security now. And basically what this offers is like a security archite architecture, which can basically be a protective seal for AI systems.

[00:22:59] Vineet Anshuman: So think [00:23:00] of, you're building a footrace for example, strong walls for data protection. You are building vigilant guards for authentication. Early warning systems like threat detection. And unlike traditional way of doing security, we are talking security, which is much more dynamic adapting to new threats and evolving threat vectors.

[00:23:22] Vineet Anshuman: That's the at the heart of, how we have built this shared responsibility model there. And our partners love it because one I still remember, almost it feels like. Many years now, but it's almost a year back when we were working with some of our very strategic partners and invited them in Palo Alto in a closed room workshop to really understand in terms of what their pain points are, right.

[00:23:44] Vineet Anshuman: And it kind of keep, became very apparent very quickly that they were looking for a lot of guidance around how AWS would recommend the security in the context of AI, right? And we very quickly, our teams got together. The tiger teams behind the scenes worked very hard to, come up [00:24:00] with this whole model, which I've heard from many partners is super, super compelling because gives them a governance framework more like an operating manual and makes it super simple in terms of simplifying security, right?

[00:24:12] Vineet Anshuman: We don't want to really reinvent things for our partners, but I think intent is how they can leverage. The old learnings and apply it in the context of AI and having a framework like that really helps them to, break it down and easy to adopt from interworking with the cloud provider.

[00:24:29] Vineet Anshuman: So that's basically covers the governance piece, which again, is very important from from any security discussion perspective. And then you know what I would also say is so we cover threat governance how do you scale security? And then the last piece is around trust building mechanism, right?

[00:24:46] Vineet Anshuman: One of the things which we have seen super important for security standout is to keep to make security seamless, right? How do you make security seamless and transparent? So that there's a end customer confidence on [00:25:00] it. So that's the other element where I would say we spend a lot of cycles so that it doesn't seem like an additional effort or I would say a bottleneck in terms of your own innovation and development timelines.

[00:25:13] Vineet Anshuman: You make it as seamless as possible so that. It's part of your normal software development cycle and not an additional burden on the customers. So that's how I would define four or five things. In terms of how we have simplified security governance skill duty responsible AI secure architecture governance framework skilled routine in terms of adoption and making the operation simpler, and then keeping it transparent, seamless, and easy for adoption.

[00:25:41] Chip Rodgers: That applies both to partners and also customers. I love that the, that you've been, pulling partners and customers together to build these frameworks and reference architectures and everything around, around security to, again, really make it more standardized [00:26:00] and streamlined and simplified and all those things.

[00:26:02] Vineet Anshuman: Yeah. I think the way we look at it Chip is how do you make security not just a protective measure, but a business enabler. Right. And that's where, looking ahead, we want organizations to thrive in AI era with most advanced algorithms, data sets that they have without having to worry too much on you know how it's going to be secured. That's the philosophy.

[00:26:31] Chip Rodgers: Yeah, well, I think AWS has always been very partner friendly and it's it's continuing in that tradition.

[00:26:40] Vineet Anshuman: Yeah, I mean, we love to obviously work backwards from our partners and customers viewpoint. And we innovate right at the place where we, we can create value and make it more, more easy and compelling and impactful for them. And it's a journey, Chip, right?

[00:26:55] Vineet Anshuman: And, it's great to be part of this amazing momentum, but it's also very [00:27:00] interesting and challenging because every single day you have something which comes as something new, which you need to, I would say break it down and make it simpler, and then. Apply it to day-to-day life, and then also share the learnings back, with customers and partners.

[00:27:13] Vineet Anshuman: So that's the.

[00:27:14] Chip Rodgers: That's amazing. Well, Vineet I really appreciate you taking some time today and sharing your thoughts. You have there's so many things going on. You have you have a big job. Managing all these partners, you and your team. But gosh, I really appreciate, it's so interesting the things that AWS is doing and and right in the mix, in the thick of this in know, amazing moment that we have with AI and with AG agentic and all that.

[00:27:43] Chip Rodgers: So, and it's very deployable, right? It's so just put it in the cloud and go forward?

[00:27:52] Vineet Anshuman: I mean, the way I would summarize this is, back to where we started from, I would say, we love back working [00:28:00] backwards, and we want to provide our customers and partners, the best place to build the most useful AI agents,

[00:28:07] Vineet Anshuman: Empowering organizations to deploy reliably and also secure agents at scale which helps them expand their business.

[00:28:15] Vineet Anshuman: That's at the heart of everything that we do every single day for our partners.

[00:28:20] Chip Rodgers: Awesome. Fantastic. Well, thank you again, Vineet, for taking the time and and sharing some time with us today and. Thank you all as well for joining another episode of inside Partnering. And I think with that, we'll we'll say see you next time. Thanks everybody, and thank you Vineet.

[00:28:39] Vineet Anshuman: Thanks Chip

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