Iowa State graduate and Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian returned to campus Friday to deliver a seminar and accept the Professional Achievement Citation in Engineering (PACE) Award.
Sivasubramanian graduated from Iowa State in 2002 with an M.S. in computer engineering. He has been awarded 250 patents and has authored 40 scientific papers and journals.
Sivasubramanian said that Friday marked his first trip back to Iowa State since his graduation.
“It’s very nostalgic and exciting to be back here,” Sivasubramanian said. “Iowa State made me who I am, and I’m very excited to see some of my old professors.”
Sivasubramanian currently works as the vice president of AWS’s Agentic AI department. According to previous reporting from the Daily, an AWS outage earlier this week caused significant disruptions to many platforms, impacting college students across the country. Sivasubramanian described Monday’s AWS outage as “highly unfortunate” and encouraged people to read the company’s report on the disruption.
Sivasubramanian said that the most rewarding part of his career is the real-life impact he has made with his colleagues at Amazon.
“I get to work with folks to create amazing systems, and that’s what I find more rewarding than anything,” Sivasubramanian said. “Working with cutting-edge technologies, not just in generative AI, but now in agentic AI, is exciting.”
Sivasubramanian said that agentive AI is software that is created by humans and used to help humans complete tasks.
“Agents are about automated software systems that leverage AI to reason, plan, adapt and pursue tasks on your behalf in the digital world, and soon, the physical world,” Sivasubramanian said.
Despite having a successful two-decade career, Sivasubramanian said he is never satisfied and is always looking for the next challenge.
“I get uncomfortable when I’m comfortable,” Sivasubramanian said. “I always look for new challenges that constantly push me.”
Sivasubramanian gave his seminar to a packed room at Morrill Hall, discussing the evolution and potential of agentic AI.
Sivasubramanian and his team recently launched Amazon Quick Suite, an application aimed to help employees research and visualize data using agentic AI.
“I’m gloriously impatient because I like to live in the future, and I am optimistic about the future of AI agents,” Sivasubramanian said.
Sivasubramanian also discussed Amazon Prime Video and the hurdles the production team faces when attempting to put together a recap. Sivasubramanian said that his team uses AI agents to help make the recap process more efficient.
“When we do a series recap, it is a really intensive problem because it is very expensive and manual,” Sivasubramanian said. “We introduced agents to streamline the process.”
Sivasubramanian said that his team divided the programming of agents into three phases: observation, reasoning and action.
“For the first phase, we asked the agents to go and observe the video and find out what’s happening,” Sivasubramanian said. “The second phase is reasoning, and we used it to communicate the best moments.”
Sivasubramanian said that the third phase, action, puts all the agents together and essentially becomes an editor, reducing the workload for Prime Video’s production staff.
Additionally, Sivasubramanian received the PACE Award from the College of Engineering for his impactful contributions to AI, cloud computing and other cutting-edge research.
Sivasubramanian said that the best advice he could give to students is to never stop learning.
“You are set up at a great school, but your education does not stop once you’re out of the university,” Sivasubramanian said. “You have to constantly reinvent yourself because the pace of innovation is not happening in decades, it is happening in years or sometimes months.”
Sivasubramanian said that technology will continue to evolve and be shaped by future generations.
“The future is going to be shaped by those who think big and dream even bigger,” Sivasubramanian said.
