Amazon is formally rolling out its new Nova family of foundation models. Teased at the re:Invent conference hosted by AWS, details of the new multimodal series began leaking out this month. As part of the move, Amazon is diving into the agentic AI business with a new model called Nova Act, which is now in research preview. Nova Act is designed to control Web browser actions and independently tackle simple tasks. A Nova Act SDK is also being made available to allow developers to customize their own agents using the general-purpose Nova. The company is pushing for agents to help streamline business productivity.

Nova Act “will also power key features of the company’s upcoming Alexa+ upgrade, a generative AI-enhanced version of Amazon’s popular voice assistant,” writes TechCrunch, explaining that “the version of Nova Act available starting today is a little less polished, however.”

“Our dream is for agents to perform wide-ranging, complex, multi-step tasks like organizing a wedding or handling complex IT tasks to increase business productivity,” Amazon explains in a blog post that hints at its plans for future iterations of Alexa. “While some use cases are well-suited for today’s technology, multi-step agents prompted with high-level goals still require constant human hovering and supervision.”

“Amazon may not be the first to develop this sort of agentic technology, but via Alexa+, it may have the widest reach,” reports TechCrunch, noting that the retail giant’s agentic tech is competing against OpenAI’s Operator and Anthropic’s Computer Use.

“A growing number of companies are building AI agents as they look beyond text and image generators,” writes CNBC.

At AWS re:Invent in December, Amazon introduced Nova, raising the curtain on its generative AI era. Earlier this month, details emerged regarding the hybrid reasoning approach for the Nova family, as well as its agentic capabilities.

In addition to the text-only Nova Micro, the series includes the speed-oriented Nova Light and general purpose Nova Pro, as well as Nova Canvas for images and Nova Reel for video. The company has also rolled out a new website, nova.amazon.com, that provides access to all the Nova models.

The Nova series “is part of a broader strategy within Amazon to invest heavily in generative AI software,” according to CNBC. “Earlier this month, Amazon’s cloud unit said it’s forming a group dedicated to developing agentic AI that’s being led by longtime Amazon Web Services executive Swami Sivasubramanian.”