At the venue of AWS Summit Seoul 2026, held by Amazon Web Services (AWS) over two days on May 19 and 20, the keywords were agentic and physical AI.

AWS said AI is shaking up the software development lifecycle and, through physical AI, is expanding beyond digital into the real world. It said it is also unveiling new programmes to support this shift. Ham Ki-ho (함기호), head of AWS Korea, said in the keynote speech at AWS Summit Seoul, "AI is rapidly evolving into agentic AI, AI-native development and physical AI." He added, "Generative AI, which first emerged just 4 to 5 years ago, is now leading to agentic AI that makes its own judgments and carries out tasks, AI-native development that changes the way development itself is done, and physical AI that extends from the digital world to the physical world."

AWS also introduced cases of South Korean companies implementing agentic AI on AWS. Ham said, "Samsung Electronics' Samsung Bixby service, used by more than 200 million people worldwide, is a system where no downtime is allowed even for a moment. Samsung Electronics built a cloud operations agent that detects failures in advance based on Amazon Bedrock Agents. This cut recovery time by more than 10 percent, and it is aiming to detect failures within 10 minutes," he said.

Ham also said South Korean companies across sectors, including LG Electronics, Yanolja, Hana Financial and Lotte Shopping, are pursuing innovation by using agentic AI on AWS.

Ham also stressed an AI-DLC (AI-Driven Development Life Cycle) methodology in which humans and AI design, develop and verify together across the full software development cycle. He said, "In AI-DLC, AI coordinates the development process and proposes architecture, while humans take charge of verification and supervision, final decision-making and responsibility." He added, "LG Electronics doubled productivity by applying AI-native development, and CJ OliveNetworks completed 5 MVP projects in a 3-day workshop and is changing development methods across the organisation," he said.

AWS is also investing aggressively in physical AI, considering South Korea's competitiveness in manufacturing.

Ham said, "South Korea has a dynamic ecosystem for physical AI across a wide range of industries, including AI chip design and robot manufacturing." He added, "Many companies, including Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Config and RealWorld, are developing physical AI on AWS and expanding their businesses. This includes AWS' practical experience of operating more than 1 million robots in Amazon fulfilment centres, end-to-end services spanning from data collection to edge inference, and global infrastructure that can help robots and models made in South Korea expand worldwide," he said.

AWS also announced a Physical AI Frontier programme at the event. It said a dedicated AWS team will provide technical support from data collection to model training, simulation and edge inference, and act as a bridge for connections between companies and for global expansion.

In a keynote speech after Ham, John Felton (존 펠튼), AWS chief financial officer, said, "AWS' cumulative investment in South Korea from 2018 to 2031 amounts to 12.6 trillion won." He added, "This large-scale investment is not simply an infrastructure expansion. It is a decision that shows AWS' confidence in South Korea, which has world-class digital foundations, an industrial ecosystem spanning semiconductors, manufacturing and finance, excellent technical talent, and a strong government will to leap into an AI powerhouse," he said.

He also said, "Agentic AI and physical AI are fundamentally changing the AI paradigm. Beyond AI that simply answers questions, the era of AI that reasons and plans on its own and autonomously executes workflows is taking shape in earnest." He added, "This transition will create economic opportunities across the industries that South Korea leads. AWS will walk alongside as a long-term partner so that South Korean companies and talent can seize this opportunity," he said.