ZDNET’s key takeaways
- The new agents marketplace will launch in beta next month.
- The companies will also launch an educational hub for IT clients.
- Developers could win a chunk of $100,000 for building agents.
As is often the case with hyped-up new technologies, interest in AI agents among business leaders is soaring — some CFOs report committing 25% of their AI budgets to them. However, practical understanding of how to implement and use them effectively remains somewhat fuzzy. A new AI agent marketplace intends to fix that.
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Software company SuperOps and Amazon Web Services (AWS) teamed up to create an agent marketplace as a guide for managed service providers (MSPs) and IT firms. Arriving in beta next month, it will let MSPs and IT professionals shop a selection of agents to find those that match their particular needs. Developers can also access the marketplace to sell their agents.
AWS debuted a similar virtual marketplace of its own for enterprise customers last month, featuring agents from developers like Anthropic, IBM, Perplexity, and others.
“This launch marks a significant turning point for the IT industry,” Arvind Parthiban, SuperOps’ cofounder and CEO, said in a statement. “We’re giving MSPs a way to tap into real, autonomous AI that can solve their day-to-day challenges and help them stay ahead. Partnering with AWS makes it possible to scale this across the industry and bring powerful, usable agents into the hands of teams that need them now.”
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The SuperOps-AWS partnership is also launching a virtual hub where MSP and IT leaders can exchange ideas and learn about the proper use of agents. The educational effort is well-timed: a recent survey found that while the majority (84%) of IT organizations are actively deploying AI agents, a relatively small percentage of them (44%) have any kind of oversight policies in place to monitor their behavior.
The companies are kicking off the launch of the new marketplace with a “SuperHack Hackathon” competition, challenging developers “to build autonomous agents for real-world IT use cases,” according to a press release. The winning agents will be featured in the marketplace, and the developers behind them will be awarded a cumulative amount of $100,000. (The press release didn’t specify how many winners would be selected, or how that amount would be divided.) You can learn more about the initiative and join the hackathon here. Registration closes on Sept.10, and the competition will kick off Sept. 22.
AI developers are racing to deploy AI agents, and businesses, in turn, are rushing to onboard them, driven largely by the promise of big productivity boosts.
Also: New data shows AI agents invading the workplace, with mixed results
A recent report from McKinsey identified agents as the most impactful burgeoning technology that’s currently reshaping the business landscape, while Gartner has forecasted that agents could be making as much as half of all internal decisions for businesses by 2027.
Artificial Intelligence
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