This means local organisations can now use even more advanced agentic AI services to innovate and grow, while also ensuring data sovereignty and security remain paramount.
These launches form part of AWS’s strategic investment in Australia through world-class data centre infrastructure, renewable energy projects, and AI programs for customers. A recent report found 41% of Australian organisations are already using agentic AI, with another 50% planning to implement it within six months. The next great technological revolution is happening right now, and AWS is committed to launching AI tools and services to strengthen Australia's digital transformation for the next decade.
Three major launches in the AWS Sydney Region this week
1. Claude Sonnet 4.5, Anthropic's most intelligent model, is now available through Amazon Bedrock in AWS Regions in Australia. The powerful model delivers practical business value through consistent performance and advanced problem-solving abilities, while ensuring their data stays under complete control with enterprise-grade tools for security, and optimisation. Organisations across enterprise, public sector, regulated industries, and startups, including companies like Canva and Airtasker, can now leverage Claude Sonnet 4.5's advanced capabilities while maintaining operational sovereignty and compliance with local regulations.
Chaitanya Kuber, Airtasker CTO, said: “At Airtasker, we’ve adopted Claude Code to accelerate delivery of product features and platform investments across every single team. Our team has found that Claude Sonnet 4.5 offers better code quality and improved task adherence compared to Claude Sonnet 4. Over the past month, our engineers have generated over 420,000 lines of code with a 96% acceptance rate across 2,200 sessions, with a cost to business of US$4,300. Amazon Bedrock has given us fine-grained control over models and limits while centralising governance and authentication concerns alongside our infrastructure. Overall feedback has been very positive, enabling us to unlock new capabilities and boost overall productivity without sacrificing code quality.”
Danny Wu, Canva Head of AI Products, said: "Claude Sonnet 4.5 on Amazon Bedrock delivers impressive gains on our most complex, long-context tasks for Canva features that empower the world to design. Through one single API we’re able to leverage world-class AI models like Claude Sonnet 4.5 on top of Amazon Bedrock’s security, scale, and management capabilities. This means we can deploy the latest models at speed to deliver a better Canva Code experience for our users. In our internal evaluations, we’ve seen a 12% improvement in the quality and accuracy of the outputs created with Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Amazon Bedrock has made adopting the latest AI incredibly easy.”
2. Agentic AI is evolving rapidly and AWS has hundreds of customers integrating agentic capabilities in their organisations. Unlike chatbots, agents don't just break tasks into steps, they take action independently and can call on other tools to continue the task, use web browsers to research, or even write code to make the repetitive task more efficient. However, the biggest barrier to creating agents is ensuring reliability and predictability in complex tasks. That's why after only three months of being in Preview globally, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is now generally available, including in the AWS Sydney Region. The service allows developers to quickly and securely deploy and operate AI agents at scale. Over 200 Australian organisations have been experimenting with AgentCore in Preview, including leading startups, banks, telcos, retail, and federal government departments. This confidence validates AWS's approach to delivering enterprise-grade AI agents to truely transform operations.
Jon Donoghue, NAB Executive Technology Modernisation, said: “Agentic AI presents a compelling opportunity to help NAB transform colleague and customer experiences. To do this safely and securely at scale across the bank, we’re trialling a variety of technologies including Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, aiming to speed-up service outcomes, automate low-value tasks and give our colleagues more capacity to solve complex customer requests.”
3. Amazon Quick Suite is AWS’s new agentic tool that quickly answers work-related questions and turns insights into actions in a safe environment. Instead of switching between multiple applications to gather data, find signals and trends, and complete tasks, Amazon Quick Suite brings AI-powered research, business intelligence, and automation into one workspace. It connects to business data and information resources across internal places like wikis and intranets, applications like Gmail, Google Drive, Office 365, Salesforce, and Slack, AWS services like Amazon S3, and access integrations to connect to 1,000+ apps through Model Context Protocol (MCP). For example, a user can check the latest monthly sales metrics, compare it against marketing initiatives, review product information, and even perform competitive research online, all through one workspace. It's been tested by tens of thousands of Amazon employees and dozens of customers, so customers can use Amazon Quick Suite for business tasks that consumer AI can't handle, as they lack critical security and privacy features, and can't connect to your business data.
Expanding compute capacity locally
To support these services, AWS has significantly expanded its computing capacity to reduce any potential bottlenecks by deploying additional AWS Trainium2 chips, purpose-built for AI training and inference in AWS Regions in Australia. AWS customers and Partners love Trainium2's industry-leading price-to-performance ratio, thanks to its cost-effectiveness design so Australian organisations can train and run AI models at scale.
Investment in Australia's Future
Amazon’s investment goes beyond infrastructure and services, and builds on its broader commitment to Australia's AI future, including a AU$20 billion investment between from 2025 to 2029 to expand, operate, and maintain data centre infrastructure in Australia. This investment is the largest global technology investment announcement in Australia's history and will help build national AI capability and position Australia as a global AI and technology leader.
With all this potential, there is still a critical skills gap threatening this potential. A recent AWS study revealed that 39% of businesses cite lack of relevant skills as the key barrier preventing them from adopting or expanding AI use. Building a pipeline of talent is one way to address this, and as a result, AWS and Code for Schools recently announced a new AI literacy program that aims to reach one million Australian K-12 students over three years.
Dean Dimkin, PwC Australia Lead Partner in Alliances and Ecosystems, said “AWS bringing the latest AI and Agentic AI technologies to Australia is a game-changer. It means more organisations can use cutting-edge AI while keeping their data onshore, and that's huge for meeting some of our client’s sovereignty requirements. It opens real opportunities: boosting productivity, building new products, and delivering better services to customers and communities. PwC Australia brings business, technology and risk leaders together to build practical AI governance so organisations can move from proof-of-concept to real impact. Tools like Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore are making powerful agentic AI accessible to more organisations. With AWS’s big investments in local infrastructure, Australia has a genuine shot at leading AI-driven innovation globally.“
While it’s still early stages in the Agentic AI revolution, AWS is taking decisive steps to position Australia at the forefront of this transformation. Since 2012, AWS has helped transform and modernise many of Australia's industries in the cloud, and is committed to doing the same with AI in the next decade, and will continue to foster an environment where Australian innovation can thrive and compete on the global stage.
