AWS Summit 2025 Reflection: AI Agents Are Ready. Are You?

Insights from the AWS Summit DC

At this year’s AWS Summit in Washington, DC, one thing is abundantly clear: AI agents are no longer prototypes, they’re production-ready. From autonomous task orchestration to domain-specific reasoning over proprietary data, we’re watching agentic AI systems - built on platforms like Amazon Bedrock - evolve from concept to critical infrastructure.

But the real story isn’t just that these agents can do more. It’s that they only succeed when built on strong data foundations and implemented with intention. At Red Oak Strategic, we believe the organizations that thrive in this next wave won’t be the ones chasing the most hype, but the ones architecting the most clarity. 

As our technical team met to debrief the workshops and sessions from DC Summit, the following represent the biggest takeaways that will drive our development:

From Assistants to Autonomous Agents

AI agents have grown up. While agents initially proved too superficial and expensive to prove production-ready, new developments from just the past 4-5 months have proven that they are now capable of interfacing with internal APIs, executing workflows, adapting to new input, and reasoning over complex, evolving knowledge bases. Better yet, they offer flexible levels of human-in-the-loop processes, letting organizations “shift-left” as they offload tedious tasks while keeping their strongest team members on high value tasks, including directly and supervising AI agents. 

This shift has huge implications. It means enterprises can now move from static, one-off AI predictions to dynamic, multi-step decisions that align closely with real business processes. But that only works if the agent is grounded in accurate, relevant, and structured information.

Why IDP Is the Real Enabler

Before an agent can decide or act, it has to understand — and most enterprise knowledge still lives in unstructured formats: scanned documents, PDFs, emails, intake forms, and more. That’s where Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) becomes essential.

With Amazon Textract, organizations can extract tables, forms, and key-value pairs from documents with surprising accuracy. Layer in Amazon Comprehend, and now your systems can identify topics, sentiment, and named entities. Combined, these tools turn previously opaque content into rich, structured inputs your agents can reason over. IDP is no longer just a data capture step,  it’s the on-ramp to intelligence.

Data Still Rules the Game

Despite all the excitement around agentic AI, one principle regarding data still holds: garbage in, garbage out. A clever orchestration framework won’t fix messy inputs, fragmented databases, or outdated content. If your agents are making decisions based on poor data, you won’t just get errors, you’ll get confident, expensive errors.

This is why Red Oak Strategic continues to take a data-first approach to AI enablement. We help organizations build cloud-native data architectures, clean and enrich their datasets, and implement feedback mechanisms that ensure ongoing accuracy. The best AI systems are not the flashiest, they’re the ones that are most accountable to the data behind them. Check out our services here.

Red Oak Strategic: Your Partner in Data-Driven AI

We’re excited about this next chapter in enterprise AI. But more importantly, we’re ready to build it the right way. Whether you’re just starting to explore how your organization could leverage AI agents or already experimenting with putting your critical document and text data to work in tandem with AI systems, Red Oak Strategic brings the experience, technical depth, and AWS-native expertise to help you scale with confidence.

So yes,  AI agents are ready. They’re powerful, flexible, and transformational.

But the real question is: Is your data ready for them?