AWS and SuperOps Launch AI Agent Marketplace for MSPs with $100k Hackathon

AWS launches AI agent marketplace with a hackathon and $100k in prizes for developers

The companies will also launch an educational hub for IT clients. As is often the case with hyped-up new technologies, interest in AI agents among business leaders is soaring -- some CFOs report committing 25% of their AI budgets to them. However, practical understanding of how to implement and use them effectively remains somewhat fuzzy. A new AI agent marketplace intends to fix that. Also: A year after Altman said superintelligence was imminent, GPT-5 is all we get? Software company SuperOps and Amazon Web Services (AWS) teamed up to create an agent marketplace as a guide for managed service providers (MSPs) and IT firms. Arriving in beta next month, it will let MSPs and IT professionals shop a selection of agents to find those that match their particular needs. Developers can also access the marketplace to sell their agents. AWS debuted a similar virtual marketplace of its own for enterprise customers last month, featuring agents from developers like Anthropic, IBM, Perplexity, and others. "This launch marks a significant turning point for the IT industry," Arvind Parthiban, SuperOps' cofounder and CEO, said in a statement. "We're giving MSPs a way to tap into real, autonomous AI that can solve their day-to-day challenges and help them stay ahead. Partnering with AWS makes it possible to scale this across the industry and bring powerful, usable agents into the hands of teams that need them now." Also: Why Perplexity is going after Google Chrome - and yes, it's serious The SuperOps-AWS partnership is also launching a virtual hub where MSP and IT leaders can exchange ideas and learn about the proper use of agents. The educational effort is well-timed: a recent survey found that while the majority (84%) of IT organizations are actively deploying AI agents, a relatively small percentage of them (44%) have any kind of oversight policies in place to monitor their behavior. The companies are kicking off the launch of the new marketplace with a "SuperHack Hackathon" competition, challenging developers "to build autonomous agents for real-world IT use cases," according to a press release. The winning agents will be featured in the marketplace, and the developers behind them will be awarded a cumulative amount of $100,000. (The press release didn't specify how many winners would be selected, or how that amount would be divided.) You can learn more about the initiative and join the hackathon here. Registration closes on Sept.10, and the competition will kick off Sept. 22. AI developers are racing to deploy AI agents, and businesses, in turn, are rushing to onboard them, driven largely by the promise of big productivity boosts. Also: New data shows AI agents invading the workplace, with mixed results A recent report from McKinsey identified agents as the most impactful burgeoning technology that's currently reshaping the business landscape, while Gartner has forecasted that agents could be making as much as half of all internal decisions for businesses by 2027.

SuperOps' new agentic marketplace makes AI agents accessible to MSPs

SuperOps' new agentic marketplace makes AI agents accessible to MSPs Artificial intelligence-native information technology management startup SuperOps Inc. today announced the imminent launch of what it says is the industry's first "agentic AI marketplace" specifically targeted at managed service providers and IT teams. The new marketplace, developed in partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc., is part of a push by the company to make AI agents more easily accessible to the thousands of organizations around the world that lack the skills to build and deploy them by themselves. SuperOps is the creator of a unified platform for MSPs that combines professional services automation and remote monitoring and management capabilities to streamline IT operations. The SuperOps AI Agent Marketplace is designed to enhance that platform when it goes live in beta in September, providing MSPs with a trusted, one-stop-shop for accessing all manner of prebuilt AI agents, which are sophisticated AI systems trained to automate various aspects of enterprise work. At the same time, it will also give developers of AI agents a place to publish and monetize their creations, the company said. According to SuperOps, the marketplace will make it simple for companies and MSPs to procure and deploy ready-made agents for common workflows, such as alert remediation, onboarding, ticket triage and similar "grunt work" operations with just a few simple clicks. Its agents can operate across multiple cloud platforms, and SuperOps believes this can help to dramatically accelerate their adoption. The startup said this kind of marketplace is desperately needed, because while MSPs and their customers have shown a lot of interest in AI, most have struggled to deliver these automated solutions alone. They face a lot of difficulty in translating enthusiasm for AI into action, with one study by Canalys showing that while 90% of MSPs are exploring AI, 61% have not yet gone beyond the pilot stage. That's despite the fact that 77% of MSPs said they're under pressure to provide AI tools to their customers. SuperOps Chief Executive Arvind Parthiban said the marketplace will solve this problem by giving MSPs access to dozens of "vetted agents" that they can make available to their customers the moment it launches next month. "It marks a significant turning point for the IT industry," the CEO said. "We're giving MSPs a way to tap into real, autonomous AI that can solve their day-to-day challenges and help them stay ahead. Partnering with AWS makes it possible to scale this across the industry and bring powerful, usable agents into the hands of teams that need them now." AI agents are ideally suited to automate IT infrastructure management tasks, and so SuperOps' announcement holds a lot of promise for MSPs, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. He explained that it's incredibly difficult for MSP's to keep up with their customer's demands, and very few have the scale to be able to implement multiple cloud workloads on the same cloud, and on the same day. "Often, these things can take weeks, if not months, and by that time it means things have changed and operators must refamiliarize themselves with all of the settings and configurations," the analyst said. "SuperOps' cross-cloud agents are especially promising in this regard, so it's good to see the innovation." To accelerate agentic AI adoption, Superops has also established a new "Agentic AI Community," which is an interactive hub where MSPs, IT team leaders and developers can come together to exchange ideas and stories, collaborate on projects and access resources. At the same time, it's also launching an AWS-powered hackathon competition, inviting global developers to create autonomous AI that can address real-world use cases, with the prospect of landing a spot in the marketplace and a share of a $100,000 prize pool for the best agents. In this way, SuperOps says, it's building an entire ecosystem that will foster learning and collaboration while stimulating innovation and making money from the best agentic AI innovations.