Your Runbook Is the Agent: Making AWS Frontier Agents Actually Work

Abstract:
"The first rule of AI agents: they're only as smart as the runbook you never wrote."
Look, I know everyone is saying "AI agents this, AI agents that" and honestly most of the demos look great on stage and then blow up in production. But here is the thing — the agents are not the problem. We are the problem. We give them zero documentation, zero structure, and then we complain "AI is not ready." Brother, it is ready. We are not ready. In this session I am going to show you — you document the workflow properly, you make sure it is the repetitive stuff, you give clear steps — these DevOps and Security Agents actually do the job. No magic. No hallucination. Just your runbook, executed properly, every single time.

Who Should Attend:
"We don't have a documentation problem. We have a 'Steve knows how to do it' problem. And Steve is on vacation."

• Engineers who know their stuff and want to give that knowledge superpowers — literally make it work 24/7 without you being there
• Security folks who are tired of hearing "shift left" in every meeting but nothing actually moves
• People who got burned by AI demos before and want to see something real this time
• Managers who keep asking "why can't we automate this?" — come, I will show you why and how to fix it

Agenda (120 minutes):
12:00 – 12:10 Arrival & Networking
12:10 – 12:25 Why Agents Disappoint
12:25 – 12:45 Document First
12:45 – 12:55 The Repetition Test
12:55 – 1:05 Break
1:05 – 1:35 Live Demo
1:35 – 1:50 Guardrails & Trust
1:50 – 2:00 Q&A

About the Speakers:
Sri Gudavalli — Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS | NAMER Financial Services
Got paged too many times for the same issue. Finally wrote it down. Then gave it to an agent. Now he sleeps. That's basically the whole story. Sri focuses on GenAI/ML, Security & Compliance, and Data & Analytics for financial services customers. He is local here in the Triangle area.
Luis Salcido — Sr. Technical Account Manager, AWS | US-ISV
Nearly 10 years at AWS helping customers keep their most critical workloads running. Luis works closely with ISV customers on operational excellence, reliability, and scaling best practices. He brings deep experience in what it takes to run production systems well — and how automation and agents can raise the bar for every team. Local in Raleigh at RDU11.
Bharat Lakhiyani — Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS | NAMER Financial Services
Bharat works with financial services customers on building secure, resilient systems on AWS. He focuses on how agentic AI fits into real-world architectures and how teams can adopt these tools practically and safely. Based in Raleigh at RDU11.