UPDATED 15:05 EDT / JULY 09 2025

AWS S3 continues to power AI-first data infrastructure, enabling scalable analytics and intelligent data agents with metadata-driven innovation. AI

AWS S3 steps beyond storage to power AI’s next wave

Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3, Simple Storage Service, has evolved from simply being a durable and scalable storage solution to a fundamental layer driving innovation across AI, analytics and data infrastructure.

AWS S3 continues to power AI-first data infrastructure, enabling scalable analytics and intelligent data agents with metadata-driven innovation.

TheCUBE’s John Furrier talks with AWS’ Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec about S3 advancements.

Following the rise of generative AI and the convergence of structured, unstructured and semi-structured data, S3 now powers a modern AI-first infrastructure that’s redefining the enterprise technology stack. But what, in particular, is S3’s value proposition as the engine to drive the AI age and deliver frontier-breaking applications?

“Today, every AI application is a data application,” said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec (pictured), vice president of technology, data and analytics at AWS. “These incredibly capable models can do so much, and they can set up so much infrastructure for these amazing agentic workflows. But at the end of the day, the thing that customizes, personalizes and gives the special sauce of a business to an AI application is its own data — and the world’s data is in S3.”

Tomsen Bukovec spoke with John Furrier at the AWS Mid-Year Leadership Summit event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed AWS S3 as a driver for intelligent, agent-driven workloads, advanced analytics and next-gen applications.

S3 delivers next-gen data infrastructure

While foundation models such as Claude Sonnet 4 are incredibly capable, what makes them valuable to enterprises is the proprietary data. S3 enables seamless integration with AWS AI tools such as Bedrock, SageMaker and QuickSight Q, making it easier for enterprises to personalize and operationalize their AI workloads, according to Tomsen Bukovec.

“Our whole goal is to make it effortless to do analytics on any type of data,” she said. “These services like Redshift and Athena now sit in the same organization as Amazon S3 and our file services, as well as our streaming and messaging services. And our whole objective here is to plumb that path from the analytics query that drives down to storage and make it as effortless and price-performing as possible.”

The next generation of data workers is AI agents, according to Tomsen Bukovec. Powered by foundational models, these agents interact with structured and unstructured data to automate tasks and delegate to each other.

“Some of the interesting evolutions that we’re seeing in these AI models are the capabilities of these agentic infrastructure, these AI agents and the workflows that you can do,” she said. “I believe that the next generation of data workers is going to be AI agents.”

Metadata is going to be the most queried part of data in the future, according to Tomsen Bukovec. To support the required data infrastructure, AWS has introduced S3 Tables and made S3 metadata generally available to meet this demand. Built on Apache Iceberg, S3 Tables allow customers to perform SQL-style queries directly on Parquet data, enabling zero-ETL pipelines and deep integration with services such as Redshift and Athena.

“What we’re seeing with the rise of Iceberg is that it gives a common way to interact with tabular data,” Tomsen Bukovec said. “It’s one of the reasons why we introduced S3 Tables back in 2024, because we saw so many of our data lakes moving towards Iceberg as a common way to interact with tabular data stored in S3.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Mid-Year Leadership Summit:

Photo: SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.

  • 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more
  • 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network.
About SiliconANGLE Media
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.

Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.