World's Fair 2025
Building Agents with Amazon Nova Act and MCP - Du'An Lightfoot, Amazon (Full Workshop)
Overview
This workshop introduces building intelligent autonomous AI systems using Amazon Nova Act and the Modern Communication Protocol (MCP). It focuses on a do-it-yourself approach, enabling developers to create agentic systems that can plan, act, and reason to achieve objectives. The session highlights how these agents can leverage tools, knowledge bases, and LLMs to tackle complex tasks, with a particular emphasis on browser automation and integrating various AI components.
Who should watch
- AI engineers and builders looking to create autonomous AI systems.
- Developers interested in agentic workflows and tool integration.
- Professionals exploring browser automation with AI.
- Anyone interested in leveraging AWS services like Amazon Nova Act and Amazon Bedrock for agent development.
- Individuals seeking to understand and implement the Modern Communication Protocol (MCP) for AI tools.
Key takeaways
- Agentic AI systems are characterized by planning, action execution using tools, and reasoning to evaluate and update plans.
- Amazon Nova Act is a research preview model for browser automation, capable of understanding and interacting with web pages like a human.
- MCP provides a protocol for AI agents to communicate with tools and services, enabling flexible integration of various AI components.
- The Strands agent framework offers an open-source, model-first approach to building agentic systems with native MCP support.
- Building agentic systems involves iterative evaluation, logging, and optimization to improve performance and accuracy.
- AWS offers multiple approaches to agent development, including specialized agents (Amazon Q), fully managed agents (Amazon Bedrock agents), and DIY frameworks like Strands.
- Nova Act can be used for tasks like web scraping, data extraction, and automating multi-step web interactions, though it may struggle with CAPTCHAs and highly complex, ambiguous tasks.
- Strands facilitates multi-agent collaboration, allowing different agents with specific roles and tools to work together on complex workflows, such as generating migration plans and presentations.
Notable quotes
*My name is Dwan Lightoot and I'm joined by Hey, I'm Banjo Bami. I'm a solic architect here at AWS.*
*Now, this is the AI engineer worldfare and I've been in tech over 15 years and right now is the most exciting time for me in my entire career. And one of the reasons for this excitement is agents.*
*The most interesting piece that I think a lot of us are probably focused on when we're building these systems is around the continuous evaluation framework.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.