Searches for "AI agents" have rocketed from 64th place to third among keyword queries on AWS Marketplace in just one year, according to Matt Yanchyshyn, vice president of AWS Marketplace & Partner Services, speaking to ZDNET. The marketplace now hosts more than 4,000 agent offerings, up from roughly 1,000 last year, out of nearly 40,000 total applications. Agent-powered marketplaces are embedding AI agents not just as products for sale but as tools that handle administrative and due diligence tasks throughout the software acquisition and deployment process.
The global agentic procurement software market reached $1.2 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 24%, hitting nearly $9 billion by 2034, according to Market Intelo projections cited in the report. Agent-powered systems can independently qualify vendors, run negotiation dialogues, apply budget constraints, and execute contracts end-to-end, the report's authors state. Bret Greenstein, chief AI officer at West Monroe Partners, told ZDNET that these marketplaces are "reducing a surprising amount of IT overhead by helping with application discovery, vendor comparison, licensing, entitlement management, auditing, renewals and even portions of contracting and procurement." Yanchyshyn noted that AWS now supports not just discovery but deployment, with due diligence seeing substantial adoption beyond traditional pricing and transaction support.
The report cautions that while agentic software acquisition offers clear benefits, AI agents "may only look at less than 70% of the solutions available," according to Shashi Bellamkonda, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group. He advised buyers to engage in "more reprompting and adding more details" and to treat marketplace outputs as high-quality drafts rather than finished decisions. Greenstein warned that faster software discovery and provisioning means enterprises need clearer policies around approved vendors, security, data access, architecture, licensing, and agent authority. Meanwhile, customers are increasingly seeking "agentic SaaS that other agents can talk to" rather than a huge army of standalone agents, Yanchyshyn said, with many wanting capabilities that incorporate agents easily.
The shift toward agent-powered marketplaces stems from their ability to automate multi-step procurement tasks without requiring human initiation for each action, unlike traditional tools that automate individual steps within human-driven workflows. Vendors are adopting agent-powered discovery to streamline buyer experiences: CharmHealth's AI assistant Ria lets prospective buyers evaluate products and explore software on their own schedule, while collecting higher-quality information for sales professionals, CEO Pramila Srinivasan explained. However, Yanchyshyn emphasized that sophisticated deals with customer configurations and custom pricing won't see automation replace human sales representatives or engineers anytime soon, noting that big deals with three-year private pricing still require experienced sales teams and procurement teams on both ends. The marketplace serves as a solution-matching engine for medium and lower-level deals, but the complexity of larger enterprise applications still demands human expertise. For now, the self-service "click-and-go" approach covers much of AWS Marketplace, while agentic capabilities focus on customer success, helping people deploy successfully and supporting bigger deals with private pricing. The balance between automation and human judgment will likely define how enterprises manage software procurement as agent capabilities mature and governance frameworks catch up.