As artificial intelligence pushes deeper into everyday systems, the idea of an AI teammate is starting to look less like a theory and more like a technical blueprint for how digital work will get done.

Amazon Web Services Inc. is now developing that blueprint with a stack built for autonomous agents that can collaborate, reason and take on real tasks with minimal oversight. Its latest frontier reasoning models and the Kiro autonomous agent point to a broader shift toward digital workers designed to operate alongside humans, not just assist them.

This approach was discussed on theCUBE earlier this year by Colleen Aubrey (pictured), senior vice president of Applied AI Solutions at AWS. She brought theCUBE up-to-date in a subsequent conversation this week.

“Certainly, the last time we talked … I had started to talk about this idea of AI teammates,” Aubrey said. “This has become more and more crisp for me. Our frontier agents with Kiro developer agent, the security and DevOps, are examples of, ‘Now I have an AI teammate.’ This idea of AI teammates, I think it applies to every function, every industry, every business. That’s sort of a mission that we’re on.”

Aubrey spoke with John Furrier at AWS re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the AI teammate is becoming more visible through customer service and retail shopping applications.

An AI teammate for customer service

One example where the AI teammate is becoming more visible can be seen in the contact center experience. Aubrey has noticed this development through Amazon Connect, a cloud-based contact center service from AWS that can handle customer interactions across voice, chat and messaging.

“I guess Connect is the furthest along in this space where we’re really trying to push in the direction of agentic experiences for end users,” she said. “It’s being able to look at not optimizing tasks or steps, but optimizing whole customer experiences. I think we’ll increasingly see controls about the personality of the AI that’s working in your team, and we’ll also see that learning start to filtrate through.”

Organizations are also learning that the integration of AI teammates involves a complicated set of parameters. Applied AI requires being able to integrate the technology effectively while meeting compliance needs.

“Applied AI is really trying to hone-in on getting AI to work in your business, in the operations, with your teams every day,” Aubrey noted. “That last mile is hard, that last mile of getting AI to meet your regulatory requirements while still getting the benefit of what AI is, which is the reasoning and the generative power.”

One way that AWS has worked to complete the last mile can be found in its autonomous shopping experience called Just Walk Out. The company’s technology uses a combination of AI, computer vision, sensors and radio frequency identification to let customers walk into a store, pick up an item and exit. It’s a prime example of AI visual reasoning at the edge and an ability to process the movement of shoppers without needing individual identification, Aubrey emphasized.

“With Just Walk Out, I think the team has done a very nice job here because it really is in the unidentified movements,” she said. “Full privacy, but also the power of full visual reasoning. We’re exploring a bunch of different applications of where you would put visual reasoning to work in an organization that solves other adjacent problems. We’re early in exploring them.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:

Photo: SiliconANGLE