How AWS Marketplace is using AI agents to meet the rising demand for AI agents
Written by Joe McKendrick, Contributing WriterContributing Writer Aug. 21, 2026 at 10:48 a.m.
PT Just_Super/ E+ via Getty ImagesFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. AWS Marketplace, one of the most well-known application marketplaces catering to enterprises of all sizes, is seeing rapid growth of its stable of AI agents, along with a rising number of traditional application offerings. A year ago, "AI agents" ranked 64th among keyword searches across the marketplace, but now ranks in third place, reported Matt Yanchyshyn, vice president of AWS Marketplace & Partner Services. Last year, the marketplace had about 1,000 agent offerings. This year, there are more than 4,000, he told ZDNET. Overall, there are now almost 40,000 applications. Also: Business adoption of AI agents tripled this year – as measurable ROI emerges When it comes to application marketplaces, however, the AI agent story goes much deeper, as agents are making your jobs easier in the software development lifecycle. AI agents are embedded in app marketplaces such as AWS, handling the nitty-gritty administrative and due diligence tasks that are part of the software acquisition and deployment process. Overall, the global agentic procurement software market was valued at $1.2 billion in 2025, and is expected to see a compound annual growth rate of 24%, reaching nearly $9 billion by 2034, according to Market Intelo projections. "Agentic procurement software uses autonomous AI agents to plan, execute, and adapt multi-step procurement tasks without requiring a human to initiate each action," the report's authors state. "Unlike traditional procure-to-pay or strategic sourcing tools that automate individual steps within a human-driven workflow, agentic systems can independently qualify vendors, run negotiation dialogues, apply budget constraints, and execute contracts end-to-end." Lately, agent-powered marketplaces have been "reducing a surprising amount of IT overhead by helping with application discovery, vendor comparison, licensing, entitlement management, auditing, renewals and even portions of contracting and procurement," agreed Bret Greenstein, chief AI officer at West Monroe Partners. Also: 'Specialists aren't required' anymore: How to stay valuable in an AI agent workplace today The ability to extend marketplace services beyond the purchasing stage to the deployment stage is advancing up the food chain from smaller apps to larger-scale enterprise applications. "We are supporting not just discovery, but deployment," Yanchyshyn said. "Due diligence is an area where we're seeing a lot of adoption, beyond traditional pricing and transaction support." The rudimentary app-store approach, the self-service "click-and-go," still covers much of the AWS Marketplace, said Yanchyshyn. However, the addition of agentic capabilities "is much more about customer success, helping people to deploy with success, private pricing, and support bigger deals." Industry observers concur that agentic software acquisition and deployment through agentic-powered marketplaces is a boon to buyers, but add some caveats. "The ability to start with a natural-language description makes it easy for software buyers to discover the solution they need," said Shashi Bellamkonda, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group.
