At its New York Summit last week AWS opened an AI agents and tools category in AWS Marketplace, alongside Amazon Bedrock AgentCore in preview and a $100M commitment to agentic AI development. Anthropic was a launch partner, with early listings from IBM, Perplexity, Salesforce, Stripe, PwC, Automation Anywhere and others.
Google got there first in structure if not in scale, announcing an agent ecosystem program and a marketplace category for partner-built agents back in November, then expanding on it at Cloud Next in April.
Two clouds, the same move within nine months. Worth asking what it means if you sell software rather than agents.
Why the clouds are moving this fast
Three reasons, in order of how much they explain:
AI budget is new budget. Most enterprise software purchases come out of a budget that already has an incumbent. AI spending in 2025 is largely incremental, approved at a level where nobody is asking which line item it displaces. The cloud that captures the procurement path captures a share of genuinely new money.
Agents need a trust layer. Nobody wants to grant an autonomous agent access to their systems based on a vendor’s website. A marketplace with validation, standard contracts and a billing relationship the customer already has is a credible answer to “should we let this thing run here”.
Distribution is the actual bottleneck. There is no shortage of agents being built. There is a severe shortage of ways to sell them to an enterprise without a six-month procurement cycle.
What it means for an ISV who does not sell agents
Three things, and only the third is urgent.
Does your product need an agent listing? Probably not yet. If you have an agent-shaped capability — something that acts rather than something a human operates — the question is whether it is a separate product or a feature of your existing one. Separate listing means separate content, separate pricing dimensions, separate review. Do not split a product to chase a category.
Metering an agent is genuinely unsettled. Per invocation, per token consumed, per task completed, per outcome achieved — all four are being tried, and they have very different revenue profiles and very different metering implementations. If you go down this path, assume your first pricing model is wrong and build so you can change dimensions without re-listing. The metering obligations are the same as for any usage-based product, with less settled convention about what a unit is.
Discovery is changing, and this affects you now. This is the part that matters even if you never list an agent. The clouds are investing in how customers find solutions, and the direction is away from browsing a catalogue toward describing a need. Listing content written to win keyword searches is being read by something that is trying to match a described requirement. That makes your listing copy a live asset rather than something you wrote once at launch.
The honest caveat
Anything written about agent pricing and packaging in mid-2025 will look naive in eighteen months. The category is three months old on AWS and eight on Google. The mechanics described here are what is available now, not a stable platform.
What is not speculative is the direction: all three clouds are pushing their marketplaces from catalogue toward default procurement path, and adjusting incentives to match. That trend has been visible since Buy with AWS landed in December and has not reversed.
What to actually do this quarter
If you sell conventional software, the correct response to the agent category is to ignore it and fix your listing content. Discovery changes will reach you before agent pricing does.
If you are building something agent-shaped, start with eligibility and metering rather than with the listing. Decide what a billable unit is, make sure you can report it reliably, and only then worry about which category it belongs in.
Our AI agents and MCP page covers where CloudX fits on the operations side, and the three-cloud comparison still holds for the fundamentals — registration, fulfillment and metering differ by cloud whether you are selling an agent or an application.
The summary
The clouds are building agent distribution because AI budget is new money and distribution is the bottleneck. For most ISVs the immediate consequence is not a new listing, it is that discovery is being rebuilt and your listing copy now has a job it did not have before.