Two pizzas and a prototype: How agentic AI is rewiring Amazon's teams and upending its traditions – GeekWire
Search for:
Search
What happens here matters everywhere.
by Todd Bishop on Jun 16, 2026 at 7:01 amJune 16, 2026 at 8:15 pm
Share
X (Twitter)
Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP of agentic AI, on stage at AWS re:Invent in December. (Amazon Photo / Noah Berger)
[Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire series, underwritten by Accenture, exploring the adoption and impact of AI and agents. See coverage of our related event.]
Amazon is legendary for its process of “working backwards.” Start with a customer problem, imagine a future in which it’s solved, draft a press release and FAQs as if it had already happened, obsess over the document until it’s just right, and then go make it a reality.
But sometime last year, it dawned on Swami Sivasubramanian, Amazon Web Services VP of agentic AI, that new coding tools had suddenly made it easier for his teams to develop a demo — actual working software — than to write the classic six-page Amazon “PRFAQ.”
So they began starting with the prototype instead.
If something is “a low-risk bet where we just want to prove our intuition, then I actually say, let’s first go build the demo, and then iterate,” Sivasubramanian said in an interview last week, in advance of his keynote address Wednesday at the AWS New York Summit.
It’s an illustration of how agentic tools are reshaping even the most entrenched workplace practices and traditions. But it’s just one of the ways that the AWS agentic AI team is departing from the company’s established norms, and in some ways returning to its roots.
Inside Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy says he wants the company to run like the world’s largest startup. Sivasubramanian’s division may be the closest thing to what that looks like in practice.
Back to two pizzas
The AWS agentic AI division is organized into dozens of small teams, many of them just large enough to feed with two pizzas. That was the organizing principle that Amazon pioneered in its early days and that much of the company outgrew as it scaled to 1.5 million employees.
When Matt Garman, the CEO of AWS, carved out agentic AI as its own division last year, Sivasubramanian went with small teams on purpose. It matches the new reality of the AI era: projects that once required 30 to 40 people, he said, can now be done by teams of six to eight.
Case in point: the Amazon Quick desktop app, which connects to a user’s email, calendar, Slack, documents, and other apps in a single workspace, and uses AI to search across them, answer questions, and perform tasks. It’s Amazon’s entry in a market where Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI have captured much of the attention.
It traces its roots to late January of this year, when Sivasubramanian said it became clear to him and others on the team that the underlying models had gotten good enough that the main missing ingredient was connecting them to the systems where people actually work.
He pulled together a team of about six engineers to build it. Six weeks later, 200 people inside Amazon were using it. Ten weeks in, it was up to 10,000 internally. The team circled back to write the PRFAQ after the product was already in beta, to help refine their approach to the external launch. They shipped on April 28, three months after they got started.
Under the old system — writing the PRFAQ, routing it through layers of review — the paperwork alone could have taken as long as building and shipping the actual product.
Similar stories are playing out across the division.
One team open-sourced Strands, an AWS software development kit for building AI agents, after a member of Sivasubramanian’s team messaged him at 7 a.m. with the idea. After a quick call with Garman, they decided to go ahead. Within days, it was done.
Kiro, the AI coding tool, was built by a deliberately small team, using Kiro itself to build it. One engineer prototyped a complex cross-platform notification feature for Kiro that had been estimated at four weeks of work, and shipped it in a day and a half.
The internal Amazon team that rebuilt the inference engine for the company’s Bedrock platform for AI models did it with six engineers in 76 days, a project originally expected to take 30 developers 12 to 18 months.
Smaller teams everywhere
What’s happening inside Amazon’s agentic AI division is part of a trend across the tech industry toward smaller teams and flatter organizations, driven by AI and agents.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index, a survey of 20,000 workers in 10 countries, found that the biggest factor behind AI’s real impact in the workplace isn’t individual skill but whether the organization has restructured around the new technologies.
Vijaye Raji, OpenAI’s CTO of applications, said during a recent Technology Alliance event that the company’s “ambitions are growing faster than we can hire people” —...