AI agents are powerful when it comes to reasoning, but turning them into reliable, production-ready systems remains a challenge. Running multi-step workflows across real tools and systems—while maintaining context, ensuring security, and enforcing governance—requires significant engineering effort. Today, we’re introducing the Stateful Runtime Environment for Agents, a new capability now available natively in Amazon Bedrock through a joint collaboration with Amazon Web Services. This runtime is designed to simplify the operational complexity of building and deploying AI agents at scale. Built with OpenAI models and optimized for AWS infrastructure, it delivers the state, reliability, and governance needed for real-world, production-grade applications. Unlike traditional stateless APIs that handle one prompt and one response at a time, the Stateful Runtime enables agents to manage complex, long-running workflows that span multiple steps, tools, and systems. In practice, this means agents can now carry forward context—such as conversation history, workflow progress, tool outputs, and system state—across interactions. They can handle approvals, conditional logic, error recovery, and resumption of interrupted tasks, all while respecting identity, permissions, and security boundaries. This eliminates the need for development teams to build custom orchestration layers from scratch. Instead of manually managing state, tool invocation, and error handling, teams can focus on designing the business logic and workflow. The runtime takes care of persistent orchestration, ensuring tasks run reliably over time with consistent context and control. The Stateful Runtime is deployed within your AWS environment, seamlessly integrating with existing security policies, identity management, and compliance frameworks. This ensures that sensitive data and workflows remain protected, and that agent behavior aligns with your organization’s governance standards. This capability unlocks new possibilities for enterprise applications such as multi-system customer support, automated sales operations, internal IT automation, and finance workflows that require approvals, audits, and traceability. The Stateful Runtime Environment in Amazon Bedrock will be available soon. If you’re interested in exploring how it can accelerate your AI initiatives, reach out to your OpenAI representative or request to be contacted for more information.