5 lessons running AI agents in production

What happens when your agentic AI prototype works great with 12 tools — but falls apart at scale? Genesys (https://www.genesys.com/) found out the hard way, then rebuilt with Strands Agents to serve 2 million users across 21 regions. In this episode, Romain sits down with John Sexton and Aaron Tummon from Genesys to discuss how they built Genesys Cloud Copilot — an agentic AI assistant that helps contact center admins and supervisors manage complexity through natural language. 🔑 Key topics covered: Why Bedrock inline agents hit a wall at 12-15 tools and how Strands Agents solved it Multi-agent architecture: orchestrator + stateless sub-agents (agents-as-tools pattern) Context management strategies: summarizing vs. sliding window conversation managers Cost optimization: moving from Sonnet to Haiku 4.5 + prompt caching (massive savings) Testing agentic systems: LLM-as-judge + integration tests + the "Sentinel" rotation Data sovereignty challenges when deploying AI across 21+ regions How domain experts contribute sub-agents without needing to understand the full framework 🔗 Resources mentioned: Strands Agents SDK: https://strandsagents.com/ Strands Agents on GitHub: https://github.com/strands-agents/sdk... Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/agentc... Genesys Cloud Copilot: https://www.genesys.com/en-gb/copilots Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-... Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen: https://www.amazon.com/Thanks-Feedbac... Mythos by Stephen Fry: https://www.amazon.com/Mythos-Stephen... 👤 About the guests: John Sexton is a Manager on the Genesys Cloud Copilot team, with a background in software development and machine learning. Aaron Tummon is a developer at Genesys in Galway, Ireland, working on agentic AI after a career spanning embedded systems and automotive. 🎙️ About the AWS Developers Podcast: Weekly conversations about Agentic AI and the future of software development with customers, AWS community members, and industry luminaries. Hosted by Romain Jourdan.