Amazon released a new AI model on Monday that can take actions in a web browser on a user’s behalf, putting Amazon at the forefront of the competitive shores in agentic AI advancements. Alongside the new agentic AI model, Amazon is releasing the Nova Act SDK, a toolkit that allows developers to build agent prototypes with Nova Act.
“We’ve created this experience to inspire builders, so that they can quickly test their ideas with Nova models, and then implement them at scale in Amazon Bedrock. It is an exciting step forward for rapid exploration with AI, including bleeding-edge capabilities such as the Nova Act SDK for building agents that take actions on the web. We’re excited to see what they build and to hear their useful feedback” said Rohit Prasad, SVP of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence.
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Rather than positioning Nova as the most powerful AI offering, Amazon has focused on its cost-effectiveness and speed, claiming the models operate at a cost that is at least 75% lower than that of competing solutions.
The Act is part of Amazon’s broader Nova family of AI models, initially introduced in December 2024. The Nova suite includes three models optimised for language understanding, along with dedicated image and video generation tools. These include Amazon Micro, Lite and Pro. Other upcoming models include Nova Premier, Reel and Canva.
Though still in early testing, Amazon has confirmed that Nova Act is already being utilized in the enhanced version of its Alexa Plus assistant to streamline everyday digital interactions.
Users can also turn on “Headless mode” which means that you can leave the AI agent to work asynchronously. Amazon also claims Nova’s reliability in unseen environments where the AI agent has zero knowledge such as a video game.
Amazon in a blog post also said, “Since large language models (LLMs) entered the public consciousness, ‘agents’ primarily referred to systems that could respond back to the user in natural language or draw on knowledge bases via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Instead, we think of agents as systems that can complete tasks and act in a range of digital and physical environments on behalf of the user. Today, these systems are still new, and most of them are limited to use cases fully covered by APIs, which few are.
Our dream is for agents to perform wide-ranging, complex, multi-step tasks like organizing a wedding or handling complex IT tasks to increase business productivity. While some use cases are well-suited for today’s technology, multi-step agents prompted with high-level goals still require constant human hovering and supervision.”
Its rivals include Google’s Gemini Flash Thinking which recently introduced Deep Research, a tool that explores complex topics and delivers its findings in a comprehensive, detailed report, and is now available for anyone to try, alongside audio overviews where users have the option to listen to an AI-generated, podcast-like discussion of their report.
Others include OpenAI which released a similar feature in January called Operator and Opera’s Browser Operator that will automate tasks such as planning vacations or perform your tasks on a website.
To expand access, Amazon has launched a dedicated web portal that allows U.S.-based developers and users to interact directly with the Nova models. Previously, these models were only available through Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI development platform within AWS.
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Amazon has been launching a slew of upgrades and innovations to stay ahead in the AI race. From a mobile app called Health AI to Rufus, to their in-house AI chips “Trainium-2” unveiled first in 2023, and now evolving through Project Rainier which is a massive AI supercomputer made up of hundreds of thousands of its homegrown Trainium chips, as well as a new server, the latest efforts by its AI chip design lab based in Austin, Texas led by Annapurna labs.
Amazon made an $8 billion investment in Anthropic which means Claude AI uses Amazon’s in-house Trainium chips. Earlier in February Amazon also announced a $100 billion investment in AI.