Amazon Web Services used its “What’s Next with AWS 2026” event to announce a broad set of updates spanning AI assistants, cross-cloud connectivity, and new compute options.

Amazon Quick arrives as an AI work assistant with a dedicated desktop app and expanded integrations covering Google Workspace, Zoom, Airtable, Dropbox, and Microsoft Teams. Users can generate polished documents, presentations, infographics, and images directly from the chat interface without needing design skills or lengthy formatting work.

On the AI model front, AWS and OpenAI are bringing the latest OpenAI models, including GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4, to Amazon Bedrock in preview. The partnership also introduces Codex on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI, giving enterprises frontier model intelligence on AWS infrastructure. In parallel, AWS announced Bedrock AgentCore Payments, the first managed capability that lets AI agents autonomously pay for APIs, MCP servers, web content, and other agents.

New compute highlights include EC2 M3 Ultra Mac instances, built on Apple M3 Ultra Mac Studio hardware with a 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, and 256 GB of unified memory. For network-heavy workloads, EC2 M8in and M8ib instances are now generally available, offering up to 43% higher performance over their M6 predecessors with up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth. AWS also expanded AWS Interconnect, a multicloud connectivity specification now supporting OCI alongside the generally available Google Cloud integration, with Azure support planned later in 2026.

If your team is evaluating which AWS services belong in your next architecture, or if you need help navigating Bedrock, EC2 instance selection, or multicloud networking, reach out to us at Excello Digital and we will help you make sense of what matters for your workloads.