AWS hired former executive David Richardson as vice president of Amazon AgentCore and appointed Joe Hellerstein as an AWS vice president and distinguished scientist, CRN reported on September 18, 2025. The report said the hires would help drive AWS’s agentic AI business around AgentCore and Kiro, but the available reporting does not specify Hellerstein’s product remit.
Who are the two AWS leaders?
CRN’s September 18, 2025 report identifies the appointments as:
- David Richardson: vice president of Amazon AgentCore. He is described as a former AWS executive.
- Joe Hellerstein: AWS vice president and distinguished scientist.
CRN said the hires were intended to help drive AWS’s agentic AI business, specifically around AgentCore and Kiro. Its accessible report does not assign Hellerstein to either product, so a specific Kiro role for him cannot be established from that account. CRN’s report
How are AgentCore and Kiro different?
AWS groups both products within its agentic AI work, but they serve different functions: AgentCore is infrastructure for building and operating agents, while Kiro is a software development agent used in coding work.
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| Product | Primary job | Place in an agent workflow |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Bedrock AgentCore | Infrastructure and capabilities for developing and operating AI agents securely and at scale. | Provides building blocks for agents intended to move beyond prototypes into production. |
| Kiro | A software development agent. | Helps with software-development tasks such as bug triage and improving code coverage. |
Amazon described AgentCore as “AWS’s pioneering set of infrastructure building blocks for developers and companies to build secure, scalable agents” in its investor release. The same release describes Kiro as a software development agent. Amazon’s investor release
What later AWS updates add to the story
In June 2026, AWS described Bedrock AgentCore as a platform for taking agents from proofs of concept to production. AWS announced developments involving knowledge, web search, optimization, policy, and agent-harness capabilities. The announcement provides later product context; it does not establish that Richardson or Hellerstein caused or led those launches. AWS’s June 2026 update
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That same AWS article reported that AgentCore agent tasks had grown 15 times over the preceding six months and that more than 2,700 Southwest developers were using Kiro. Those are AWS-reported figures from 2026, after the appointments—not independent measures of either leader’s impact.
AWS’s later account also describes Kiro mobile and cloud-session capabilities. These developments show how the products were presented after the 2025 hires, but do not clarify Hellerstein’s original remit. AWS Summit New York 2026 announcements
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- AI NPU with XDNA 2 ARCHITECTURE - Powered by 16 “Zen 5” CPU cores, 50+ peak AI TOPS XDNA 2 NPU and a truly massive integrated GPU driven by 40 AMD RDNA 3.5 CUs, the Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 is a transformative upgrade and delivers a significant performance boost over the competition. The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 excels in consumer AI workloads like the llama.cpp-powered application: LM Studio. Shaping up to be the must-have app for client LLM workloads, LM Studio allows users to locally run the latest language model without any technical knowledge required and unleash their creativity and productivity.
- AMD RADEON 8090S iGPU GAMING PC - The AMD Radeon RX 8060S offers all 40 CUs with up to 2.9 GHz graphics clock and uses the new RDNA 3.5 architecture. The powerful iGPU is positioned between an RTX 4060 and 4070 laptop GPU and therefore enables gaming in FHD at maximum details in most demanding games. The 8060S can also utilize the full 128GB pool, which is perfect for running LLMs such as Deepseek 70B Q8, which runs comfortably on this machine.
- EIGHT CHANNEL LPDDR5X - LPDDR5X is a new ground breaking memory small form factor installed on-board. With blazing speeds up to to 8000MT/s, it runs 1.5x faster than the DDR5 SODIMMs; 90% better performance over DDR5 SODIMMs in video conferencing and photo editing; 30% better performance in productivity apps; 12% better performance in digital content workloads.
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What the appointments do—and do not—show
The report places the hires within AWS’s effort to advance agentic AI, with Richardson explicitly named to lead AgentCore. It does not provide enough detail to connect Hellerstein to a specific product or to attribute later product releases, usage figures, or business results to either appointment. The distinction matters: AgentCore and Kiro fit under a broad agentic AI strategy, but one is agent infrastructure and the other is a software development agent.
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