AWS exec says that CEOs are no longer worried if AI will add value to businesses

The ‘Big AI Question’ seems to have changed. Until 2025, the general artificial intelligence (AI) worry was if investment in the technology was really worth it and if it will add to the bottomline.

The same has shifted in 2026, and now the key concern is how safe are AI Agents. Companies do not yet trust AI with important decisions. According to a report by GeekWire, this was the general consensus at the recent Madrona's IA40 Summit. The Madrona's IA40 Summit is the venture capital company's annual gathering of AI startups, investors and tech executives. Zico Kolter, the Carnegie Mellon professor who chairs the safety and security committee of OpenAI's board, said that as of now Companies do not yet trust AI with important decisions.

According to Kolter, the ability to control AI systems has to keep pace with their capabilities, which might mean developing them more slowly than is possible.His view was shared by Amazon Web Services (AWS) Agentic AI and Emerging Technologies organization head Swami Sivasubramanian. AWS's top executives said that most CEOs and CTOs worry about whether an AI agent will always follow their company’s rules and regulations.

Speaking at the Summit, Sivasubramanian said that nearly every CIO and CEO raises the same question about AI agents. “How do I know it is always going to obey all my rules and regulations?” he said.

“This is a real concern.” He added that companies can keep the creativity of AI models by pairing them with separate systems that check a model’s work against the company’s rules and catch violations.Sivasubramanian said that one of the least appreciated parts of making AI agents work is getting them the right company data for the task.

He pointed out that teams inside Amazon were showing him impressive AI agents they had built in two or three weeks. When he asked when the agents could be rolled out, he said that almost every team told him it still had to work out security, identity and monitoring.AWS in June announced a service for that purpose, called AWS Context, which maps the relationships in a company’s data for agents to use. Sivasubramanian said it’s meant to work across platforms and cloud providers, and he expects this kind of service to be a basic building block for the next 20 years, as cloud storage and databases were two decades ago.

AI has boosted profits, but the jump is not substantial

McKinsey senior partner Lari Hamalainen reportedly said that about 40% of companies claim AI has increased their profits, but only 6% describe the increase as substantial. Even as AI becomes more and more capable, there’s still lots of work to do to close the gap between “the goals, the capabilities, and what we all are aspiring to do,” McIlwain said.Madrona’s closing slide at the Summit said that returns on AI are still early for most of the companies using it but look inevitable based on what the earliest adopters are seeing.