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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- AWS Marketplace uses AI agents to meet the rising demand for AI agents.
- Agent-powered marketplaces extend support to due diligence and deployment.
- Larger enterprise apps still require human sales teams.
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
How marketplaces reduce IT overhead
“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. However, he cautioned, AI agents “may only look at less than 70% of the solutions available. This is not an AWS issue but the way the models work.”
To fully take advantage of agent-powered marketplace searches, Bellamkonda advised engaging in “more reprompting and adding more details.” At the same time, always question the output from their marketplace engagements, he added. “Treat it as a high-quality product but not a finished decision, and study the draft through human eyes and not use it ‘as is.'”
Also: The 3 types of people who will excel in the AI agent era, according to tech leaders
At the same time, such automated features raise the stakes for governance. “When software can be discovered, evaluated and provisioned faster, enterprises need clearer policies around approved vendors, security, data access, architecture, licensing and agent authority,” Greenstein cautioned.
Simultaneously, agent-powered marketplaces are increasingly helping buyers find their own agents. Increasingly, more customers “are looking for specific agents, or things that incorporate agents easily,” said Yanchyshyn. “Initially, people wanted just an agent, like an Atomic MCP server. And they want agentic capabilities, but don’t necessarily want a huge army of standalone agents. People are still looking for SaaS, but they’re looking for agentic SaaS that other agents can talk to.”
Software or SaaS vendors themselves are seeing the advantages of providing agent-powered discovery and follow-up when offering their products. CharmHealth, for example, provides an AI assistant called Ria designed to help prospective buyers evaluate its products while streamlining onboarding.
No replacement for human reps
“Instead of waiting for a sales representative to schedule a demo, buyers can get the information they need and explore software on their own time and at their own pace,” said Pramila Srinivasan, CEO of CharmHealth. “There’s another benefit to this approach: Ria can collect and pass along higher-quality information to our sales professionals. By the time a prospect connects with a salesperson, they have a better understanding of what the prospect is looking for, what they’ve already explored, and where they may have questions.”
Also: The autonomous business is coming. Why that’s good news for professionals
AWS’ Yanchyshyn doesn’t see agent-powered marketplaces taking the place of live human sales representatives or engineers anytime soon, either.
“Medium and lower-level deals are increasingly getting automated, the marketplace serves as a solution-matching engine,” he noted. “However, more sophisticated deals with customer configurations and custom pricing with salespeople is not going away. With big deals and three-year private pricing, you need a sophisticated, experienced sales team on one end and procurement team on the other.”
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