Until 2025, the general artificial intelligence (AI) worry was if investment in the technology was really worth it and if it will add to the bottomline. The same has shifted in 2026, and now the key concern is how safe are AI Agents.
This was the general consensus at the recent Madrona’s IA40 Summit, according to a report by GeekWire. Zico Kolter, the Carnegie Mellon professor who chairs the safety and security committee of OpenAI’s board, said that as of now Companies do not yet trust AI with important decisions. The ability to control AI systems has to keep pace with their capabilities, which might mean developing them more slowly than is possible, according to Kolter.
The ‘Big AI Question’ seems to have changed. Companies do not yet trust AI with important decisions. The Madrona’s IA40 Summit is the venture capital company’s annual gathering of AI startups, investors and tech executives.
Sivasubramanian said it’s meant to work across platforms and cloud providers, and he expects this kind of service to be a basic building block for the next 20 years, as cloud storage and databases were two decades ago. AWS in June announced a service for that purpose, called AWS Context, which maps the relationships in a company’s data for agents to use.
AWS’s top executives said that most CEOs and CTOs worry about whether an AI agent will always follow their company’s rules and regulations. Sivasubramanian said that one of the least appreciated parts of making AI agents work is getting them the right company data for the task. When he asked when the agents could be rolled out, he said that almost every team told him it still had to work out security, identity and monitoring.
His view was shared by Amazon Web Services (AWS) Agentic AI and Emerging Technologies organization head Swami Sivasubramanian. He pointed out that teams inside Amazon were showing him impressive AI agents they had built in two or three weeks.