Amazon is ramping up its AI activity, reportedly planning to release its own advanced reasoning model as part of the company’s Nova family. The Nova line was introduced in December at re:Invent and the new addition could debut as early as June. Its reasoning prowess is being compared to the abilities of OpenAI’s o3-mini and DeepSeek-R1. But reports say Amazon is taking the hybrid reasoning approach embraced by Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Amazon has a 10 percent stake in Anthropic). The e-retail giant is also preparing for an agentic AI push, having established a dedicated unit, reports say.

Agentic AI is “seen as the next stage in the world of artificial intelligence, and a key focus point for many of Amazon’s rivals,” TechRadar writes, adding “the initiative is believed to be led by AWS AI and data VP Swami Sivasubramanian,” reporting to AWS CEO Matt Garman.

Garman recently circulated an internal email saying “Agentic AI has the potential to be the next multi-billion business for AWS. We have the opportunity to help our customers innovate even faster and unlock more possibilities, and I firmly believe that AI agents are core to this next wave of innovation,” according to Reuters.

Amazon’s first move into agentic AI is in the consumer space, with a recently previewed Alexa+ voice assistant. The new move under Garman and AWS aims to serve enterprise clients.

AWS has an extensive AI model catalog offering a wide variety of third-party models in addition to Amazon’s own AI, though the company has to this point taken what seems to be a rather neutral approach, the end-goal being to have business customers hosting their preferred AI using AWS. These latest moves see the company appearing to get more aggressive in competing with the likes of Meta, Google and OpenAI.

“Amazon also hopes to make its Nova reasoning model more price-efficient than competitors,” reports TechCrunch, which feels “that might be a tall order. DeepSeek has developed a reputation for pricing its models incredibly cheaply.”

“Reasoning AI models are gaining traction as they enable complex problem-solving,” explains Economic Times, noting they are “capable of providing quick answers as well as more complex outputs after extended ‘thinking.’”

TechRadar says Salesforce “has arguably led the way” in agentic AI, with “endless investments and innovations,” adding that CEO Marc Benioff “envisions the next generation of CEOs having to manage humans an AI agents simultaneously.”

Reuters reports AWS SVP Peter DeSantis has indicated a divisional reshuffling to “accelerate innovation.”