On March 24, 2026, some of the most influential minds in artificial intelligence will descend upon Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture for a day-long examination of the technology that is rapidly reshaping enterprise computing, consumer products, and the very nature of work itself. GeekWire’s AI Summit, titled Agents of Transformation, promises to assemble senior leaders from Amazon, Microsoft, the Allen Institute for AI, and other powerhouses for a candid, deeply technical conversation about autonomous AI agents — the software systems that can reason, plan, and act on behalf of humans with minimal oversight.
The event arrives at a pivotal moment. After years of generative AI hype centered on chatbots and image generators, the industry’s center of gravity has shifted decisively toward agentic systems — AI that doesn’t merely respond to prompts but takes initiative, executes multi-step workflows, and interacts with external tools and databases. The transition has profound implications for enterprise software vendors, cloud infrastructure providers, and the millions of knowledge workers whose daily routines are being automated at an accelerating pace. As GeekWire reported,
The speaker roster reads like a who’s who of Pacific Northwest AI leadership. Amazon Web Services is sending Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of AI and Data at AWS, who has been instrumental in building out the company’s Bedrock platform for foundation models and its suite of agentic AI services. Sivasubramanian, a longtime Amazon veteran, oversees a sprawling portfolio that includes Amazon Q — the company’s AI assistant for enterprise developers and business users — as well as the infrastructure layer that thousands of startups and Fortune 500 companies rely on to deploy their own AI agents. His presence at the summit signals AWS’s intent to position itself as the default infrastructure provider for the agentic era, much as it dominated the first wave of cloud computing.
Microsoft, Amazon’s fiercest rival in both cloud computing and AI, is represented by Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President of Business and Industry Copilot at Microsoft. Lamanna sits at the intersection of Microsoft’s massive Copilot initiative and its deep partnership with OpenAI, overseeing the integration of AI agents into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform. His work has placed autonomous agents inside the workflows of sales teams, customer service operations, and financial analysts at some of the world’s largest corporations. According to GeekWire’s event page, Lamanna is expected to discuss how enterprises are moving from experimentation to full-scale deployment of AI agents — a transition that has proven far more complex than many early adopters anticipated.
The summit is not limited to the commercial giants. Kiana Ehsani, a Senior Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), brings a research-first perspective to the proceedings. Ehsani’s work focuses on embodied AI — systems that can perceive, reason about, and interact with the physical world. Her research has explored how AI agents can navigate complex environments, manipulate objects, and understand spatial relationships, capabilities that are foundational to the next generation of robotics and autonomous systems. AI2, the nonprofit research institute founded by the late Paul Allen, has long served as Seattle’s intellectual engine for AI research, and Ehsani’s participation underscores the growing convergence between academic breakthroughs and commercial applications.
Also on the roster is Theresa Piasta, who brings experience from the venture and startup ecosystem. The inclusion of voices from outside the Big Tech duopoly is significant: much of the most innovative work in agentic AI is happening at startups that are building specialized agents for legal research, medical diagnosis, software engineering, and supply chain management. These smaller companies often move faster than their larger counterparts, unencumbered by legacy systems and organizational inertia, and their experiences offer a ground-level view of what is actually working — and what is not — in production environments.
To understand why an event like Agents of Transformation has attracted such high-caliber speakers, it helps to understand the economic forces at play. The global market for AI agents is expanding at a blistering pace. Enterprise software companies are racing to embed agentic capabilities into their products, driven by customer demand for automation that goes beyond simple question-and-answer interactions. Salesforce has launched Agentforce. ServiceNow has built AI agents into its IT service management platform. SAP is weaving agents into its ERP suite. The common thread is a belief that the next trillion dollars in enterprise software value will be captured not by the companies that build the best chatbots, but by those that build the most reliable, trustworthy, and capable autonomous agents.
The technical challenges, however, remain formidable. Agentic systems must be able to reason over long time horizons, recover gracefully from errors, and operate within strict guardrails to prevent unintended consequences. A customer service agent that autonomously issues refunds, for example, must understand company policy, detect fraud, and escalate edge cases to human supervisors — all in real time. The gap between a compelling demo and a production-grade system is enormous, and it is precisely this gap that the GeekWire summit aims to explore. As GeekWire noted, the event will feature not only keynote presentations but also panel discussions and interactive sessions designed to surface the hard-won lessons of early adopters.
The choice of Seattle as the venue is no accident. The city and its surrounding region have become the undisputed nerve center of American AI development. Amazon and Microsoft, both headquartered in the greater Seattle area, collectively employ tens of thousands of AI researchers and engineers. The Allen Institute for AI, the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science, and a dense network of AI-focused startups and venture capital firms have created an ecosystem that rivals — and in many respects surpasses — Silicon Valley’s AI cluster. NVIDIA, Meta, Google, and Apple all maintain significant AI research operations in the region, drawn by the talent pool and the proximity to AWS and Azure’s engineering teams.
This concentration of talent and capital means that decisions made in Seattle boardrooms and research labs ripple outward across the global technology industry. When AWS launches a new agentic AI service, it instantly becomes available to millions of developers worldwide. When Microsoft integrates a new Copilot capability into Office, it reaches hundreds of millions of enterprise users. The GeekWire summit, by bringing these decision-makers together in a single room, offers a rare window into the strategic thinking that will shape the industry’s trajectory over the next several years.
For the enterprise executives, developers, and investors who will fill the seats at the Museum of Pop Culture, the stakes are intensely practical. Companies that successfully deploy AI agents stand to realize dramatic gains in productivity, speed, and cost efficiency. Early data from Microsoft’s Copilot deployments suggests that knowledge workers can save several hours per week on routine tasks like email triage, meeting summarization, and data analysis. Amazon’s internal use of AI agents in its logistics and retail operations has reportedly yielded significant efficiency improvements. But the risks are equally real: poorly implemented agents can generate inaccurate outputs, violate regulatory requirements, or erode customer trust.
The regulatory environment adds another layer of complexity. The European Union’s AI Act, which imposes strict requirements on high-risk AI systems, is forcing companies to build more robust governance frameworks around their agentic deployments. In the United States, the regulatory picture remains fragmented, with different agencies taking different approaches to AI oversight. Speakers at the summit are expected to address these governance challenges head-on, offering frameworks for responsible deployment that balance innovation with accountability.
Perhaps the most consequential question hanging over the summit is whether agentic AI will fulfill its proponents’ grandest promises or settle into a more modest — but still valuable — role as an incremental productivity tool. The optimists, including many of the speakers on the GeekWire stage, envision a future in which AI agents handle the vast majority of routine cognitive work, freeing humans to focus on creative, strategic, and interpersonal tasks. The skeptics point to the persistent challenges of reliability, hallucination, and the difficulty of building agents that can operate safely in high-stakes environments like healthcare, finance, and critical infrastructure.
What is beyond dispute is that the companies and researchers gathering in Seattle on March 24 will have an outsized influence on how this technology evolves. With leaders from AWS, Microsoft, AI2, and the startup ecosystem all represented, the Agents of Transformation summit is positioned to be one of the most substantive AI industry gatherings of 2026. For those who cannot attend in person, GeekWire’s event page offers registration details and additional information on the full speaker lineup and agenda. In an industry that often prioritizes spectacle over substance, the promise of a rigorous, insider-level conversation about the real challenges and opportunities of agentic AI is, in itself, a welcome development.
Seattle’s AI Power Brokers Converge: Inside GeekWire’s High-Stakes Summit on the Future of Autonomous Agents first appeared on Web and IT News.
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