"Generative artificial intelligence (AI), which emerged 4 to 5 years ago, is expanding into agentic AI, AI DLC (downloadable content), and physical AI. It is entering the physical world from digital."
Ham Ki-ho, head of AWS Korea, said at AWS Summit Seoul 2026 at COEX in Samseong-dong, Seoul, on the 20th, "This year is a special year marking the 20th anniversary of Amazon Web Services (AWS)." He added, "AWS's vision in 2006 that anyone with a credit card should be able to access world-class technology is now providing more than 240 services in 190 countries."
Ham defined AI DLC not as something that helps with development but as a new standard that redesigns how organizations work with AI. He said, "AI is now going beyond coding tools to change the development approach itself," and "AWS proposes a new methodology called AI DLC, in which people and AI design, develop, and validate together across the entire software development cycle." He continued, "AI proposes development process orchestration, planning, and architecture, while people take on validation, oversight, final decision-making, and accountability, creating a new world."
On physical AI, he said, "Korea is a country with a dynamic ecosystem for physical AI across a range of industries, including AI chip design, robot foundation models, and robot manufacturing."
John Felton, AWS chief financial officer (CFO), said in a keynote, "Korea is not just business sites for AWS but a partner building the future together," adding, "AWS has invested 12.6 trillion won in Korea since 2018, which means generating an economic impact of about 15 trillion won on the Korean economy and training more than 300,000 talents with AI product capabilities."
Felton said, "Korea today is one of the most strategically important ecosystems in the world, and all of you have world-class infrastructure and connectivity and possess a dynamic corporate ecosystem across various sectors, including semiconductors, manufacturing, and financial services," adding, "There is outstanding talent in diverse areas, including engineering and research, and a government with the ambition to lead the AI era and pursue the 'AI Highway' vision."
Jason Bennett, AWS vice president of global startups, said, "With agents, we are completely re-architecting how we build software." He added, "AI-based software development tools have rapidly evolved over the past year from inline tab autocomplete to full function generation and completion of multi-step tasks."
Vice President Bennett, mentioning Kiho, the AWS coding assistant, said, "We wanted to bring the exciting parts of AI-based software development while adding the structure developers really need," adding, "With Kiho, we were able to ship more code in the past five months than in the past 10 years." On Amazon Quick, which redesigns everyday work, he said, "If you think about how you spend your time at work, you may be spending hours every day on tasks like search, summarization, and context switching, where your expertise isn't actually required," adding, "That's why we built Amazon Quick."
Kim Sung-hoon, head of Upstage, gave a presentation on the theme "What should we prepare for in the era of autonomous and procedural agents," saying, "People personally use many AI agents, but there is still a lot of manual work in the actual work of corporations," and "The reason a company cannot bring in agents right away is because process matters." He explained that when a company works, it must be reproducible and explainable, and if there are errors, they must be corrected, so process matters.
Kim said, "Upstage believes that by creating these procedural agents, corporations can adopt them quickly, so we are focusing here," mentioning Upstage Studio. He added, "I think procedural agents and task-oriented agents can increasingly be integrated into one," and "Upstage wants to take the journey from procedural agents to autonomous agents together with you."