Executive Q&A: Accelerating AI Success with Splunk and AWS

As the tech community gathers for AWS re:Invent, we’re excited to share an exclusive conversation with two leaders shaping the future of AI: Hao Yang, VP & Head of AI at Splunk, a Cisco company, and Bill Fine, Product Leader – Agentic AI at AWS.

Against the backdrop of re:Invent’s focus on cloud innovation, this discussion explores how Splunk and AWS’s strategic collaboration enables organizations to unlock the full potential of their data, models, and operations—accelerating AI success and building resilient, intelligent systems for the future.

How does the longstanding partnership between Splunk and AWS elevate the AI capabilities available to joint customers, and what strategic areas are you prioritizing to drive transformative AI innovation?

Hao Yang: Our partnership with AWS, now over 13 years strong, is built on our shared vision of empowering customers to achieve success with AI at scale. Together, we’ve been focused on making transformational changes for our customers in security, observability, and cloud operations.  

At the core of this collaboration is a trusted, scalable data foundation for AI innovation. By combining Splunk’s ability to ingest and analyze vast amounts of machine data within AWS’s robust cloud infrastructure, we make trustworthy data accessible, reliable, and ready for innovation at scale. This ensures that customers can tap into the full value of their data, unlocking real-time visibility into their highest value data in a searchable, accessible, and useable form.

We also bridge real-time data with business context. Through integrations like Splunk AI Toolkit and Amazon SageMaker, we enable context-aware AI, empowering faster decisions and reducing blind sports across critical domains like security, IT, and observability.  We’re focused on unleashing always-on agentic AI for proactive operations, which is where our Splunk Model Context Protocol (MCP), and AWS DevOps Agent come into play, helping to predict and prevent issues before they impact the business.

Can you elaborate on what AWS DevOps Agent is, its specific role in this partnership, and how it helps customers achieve always-on agentic AI?

Bill Fine: AWS DevOps Agent is essentially an autonomous AI teammate that thinks and acts like your best operations engineer. What makes it special is that it doesn't require you to change anything about how you work - it integrates directly with Splunk and all your existing tools.

Here's the magic: it's constantly learning from your Splunk data, mapping your application resources, correlating telemetry with your code and deployments. When an incident happens, it doesn't just alert you—it actually investigates, finds the root cause, and creates detailed mitigation plans to resolve it. The "always-on" part means it's working 24/7, preventing incidents before they happen by reviewing past investigations and patterns in your Splunk data to identify underlying problems.

What I love about it in our Splunk partnership is that it meets teams where they are. Because it's trained on operational best practices, it's like adding an experienced DevOps engineer to every team, one that has perfect memory of every incident and learns from every action taken. The integration with Splunk is seamless - it uses Splunk's rich observability data to make intelligent decisions about your infrastructure, reducing MTTR significantly.

What unique role does an ISV like Splunk play in augmenting AWS's capabilities to deliver this agentic AI ecosystem?

Bill Fine: Our teams worked together to create a built-in integration that enables DevOps Agents to understand relationships between Splunk telemetry and entities in the application topology it maintains and introspect those relevant metrics, logs, and traces as it works to resolve and prevent incidents.

In what ways is agentic AI integrated within the Splunk and AWS collaboration, and how does this advance proactive operational excellence and business resilience for customers?

Hao Yang: Agentic AI is the cornerstone of our collaboration with AWS, particularly through the integration of Splunk MCP with AWS services like AWS DevOps Agent. This integration allows us to create intelligent systems that evolve from being purely reactive to truly proactive, turning data into continuous, actionable intelligence.

With this integration, customers can not only unlock deeper operational insights from their Splunk data, but also continuously monitor, analyze, and take automated action based on learned patterns and detected anomalies. This creates an always-on AI capability—one that can anticipate potential issues, address them before they escalate, and adapt dynamically as conditions change.

Splunk recently earned three prestigious AWS Partner Awards. How do these accolades underscore the evolving impact and strategic value of this partnership in shaping the AI landscape?

Hao Yang: Receiving the awards for Public Sector Technology Partner of the Year – EMEA, Health Care Life Sciences (HCLS) Technology Partner of the Year – Global, and Technology Partner of the Year - France is a tremendous honor and a powerful endorsement of our joint impact.

These awards reflect how the Splunk–AWS partnership is delivering meaningful innovation in critical industries where reliability, security, and agility are non-negotiable. They underscore the strategic value of uniting trusted data, scalable cloud infrastructure, and advanced AI capabilities to solve some of the most pressing challenges faced by public sector, healthcare, and life sciences organizations.

Most importantly, these accolades reaffirm our shared mission: to drive real-world outcomes with AI—helping customers operate with greater intelligence, resilience, and speed, and shaping the future of how data-driven organizations succeed.

What are the key strategic initiatives and innovations you anticipate in the Splunk-AWS partnership that will address the future demands and opportunities in AI?

Bill Fine: This is where things get really exciting. We're at an inflection point with agentic AI—it's moving from "nice to have" to absolutely essential for competitive businesses. With Splunk, we're not just thinking about individual AI agents anymore; we're building entire ecosystems of collaborative agents that can work together.

What's really transformative is how we're making this accessible. Through our partnership with Splunk, we're ensuring that these AI agents can work across any cloud environment, not just AWS. That's huge for enterprises with hybrid or multi-cloud strategies. The agents learn from Splunk's comprehensive view of the entire infrastructure, regardless of where it runs.