AWS re:Invent 2025 Through My Eyes: AI Agents and the Future of Tech

In December last year, I had the privilege of attending AWS re:Invent 2025 in Las Vegas with an exceptional cross-company delegation from MerchantE and Omise. The scale was massive, with over 60,000 attendees across six major Las Vegas venues, including The Venetian, Caesars Forum, and Mandalay Bay. The energy was unmatched, and the insights were invaluable—especially around AI Agents and AgentCore, which will be transformative for our future roadmap.

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Day 0 — ASEAN Executive Dinner & A Magical Start

We kicked off on Nov 30 at the AWS Asia Pacific & Japan on Tour – ASEAN Executive Dinner at TAO Asian Bistro & Nightclub (The Venetian). Incredible food, ambience, and conversations—plus the famous mirror cat made an appearance. This evening set the tone for one of the most inspiring technology events I’ve experienced.

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Day 1 — Matt Garman’s Keynote & The Dawn of the Agentic Era

Key takeaway: AI Agents are the next major platform shift—bigger than the internet in impact—transforming how software is built, deployed, automated, and operated, across every industry including payments.

Highlights from the keynote

• AI Agents as first-class citizens in AWS
• Bedrock AgentCore emerging as the enterprise standard for agent orchestration
• Nova Forge for frontier model customization at scale
• Graviton5, Trainium3, and next-gen infrastructure
• Agentic automation is foundational for the future of development.

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Long walks between venues, well-stocked breaks, and high-value sessions made for a productive day.

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Day 2 — Swami’s Keynote: Deep Dive into AgentCore & Agentic Workflows

Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian (VP of Agentic AI) delivered the most forward-thinking keynote of the event. Including these major announcements:

• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (GA & new capabilities)
• Policy Controls for safe execution
• Built-in Evaluations for correctness & performance
• Episodic Memory enabling agents that learn over time
• AgentCore Runtime for secure, serverless agent execution
• Integrations with LangChain, LangGraph, and open agent frameworks
• End-to-end patterns for onboarding, underwriting, customer support, and operations automation
• Vision for enterprise agents as trusted co-workers

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Apart from the amazing session, the Kiro Experience Center was impressive. The night ended with Thai Night. Thanks to AWS Thailand and sponsors like DoIT, we enjoyed Thai Night with great food (yes—the Wagyu was amazing!), music, and rich conversations.

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Day 3 — The EXPO: The Future of Engineering, All in One Room

The EXPO at The Venetian showcased the ecosystem. One dominant theme: AI AGENTS. EVERYWHERE.

• Datadog → Agentic workflows that take automated actions on alerts
• Elastic → Auto-scaling, search optimization, and ML-powered analysis with GenAI
• Splunk → GenAI-driven incident assistance
• Redis, Docker, MongoDB, Tableau → New agent-focused capabilities
• Twilio → GenAI suite to turn ideas into ready-to-launch products

These were shippable features in tools we use or plan to use.

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Payments Leaders Lunch — Industry Roundtable

I also had the opportunity to attend the Payments Leaders Lunch with Fred, Bjorn and Kazu, an open and insightful roundtable with leaders from global acquirers, payment processors, fraud & risk platforms, and fintech infrastructure providers.

🔍 Key Insights from the Lunch

• AI agents are reshaping KYC, onboarding, and underwriting
• Agentic automation is reducing time-to-merchant-activation
• Monitoring + agentic remediation will redefine gateway reliability
• Agentic reporting and dispute automation will become the new standard
• MCP-style middleware will increasingly be AI-driven gateways

This discussion validated many of the directions we’re exploring at Omise and MerchantE. We also had the opportunity to experience The Sphere, thanks to our U.S. IT vendor. It was truly breathtaking and immersive, an absolute must-do in Las Vegas.

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Day 4 — re:Play & The Big Finish

By Day 4, our brains were overflowing—re:Invent’s content density is no joke. AWS re:Play was the perfect reset: massive skill games, endless food and drinks, live music, and thousands of builders celebrating innovation. And yes, I found samosas.

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My Technical Takeaways — What Matters for Omise & MerchantE

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1) Bedrock AgentCore is a game-changer for payments

Enterprise platform for autonomous agents: guardrails & policy controls, memory/state, evaluation standards, secure execution, multi-tenant support, and interoperability with external frameworks.

Impact for payments

• Automated onboarding & KYC; intelligent underwriting
• Merchant support agents; dispute handling automation
• Operational monitoring with autonomous remediation; MCP agents (API-first integration layer)

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2) Infrastructure innovations will reduce cost and improve performance

• Graviton5 → Better performance per dollar for compute-heavy services
• Trainium3 UltraServers → Cost reduction for GenAI workloads
• Network fabric upgrades → Improved latency & reliability; Nitro Offload Engines → Better isolation and efficiency

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3) Observability & Ops are becoming agentic

• Datadog → Automatically diagnose and act via agentic workflows
• Elastic → Intelligent auto-scaling driven by signals
• Splunk → AI-driven triage and RCA tools

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Gratitude & Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to the AWS Thailand team for making the experience seamless and truly customer-first.

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Final Thoughts

re:Invent 2025 was more than a conference—it was a glimpse into the next decade of computing. As Omise and MerchantE move into 2026, the themes are clear: AI agents, automation, cost-efficient infrastructure, developer empowerment, intelligent payments, and scalable merchant experiences. I’m returning inspired, energized, and excited for what we will build next—together.

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See you at re:Invent Dec 1, 2026.

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Cheers!

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Written by Amborish Acharya (Group CTO, Omise)

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