AWS re:Invent week is always a fast-paced mix of announcements, meetings, and conversations with other sellers and partners. From learning what industry leaders are doing to understanding where AWS is placing its biggest bets, there’s a lot to process. Now that we’ve had a moment to pause, here’s the lowdown on the most important AWS Marketplace announcements from this year’s event. These highlights will help you prioritize your marketplace strategy for 2026 and set you up for what could be your strongest year yet.
1. Agent Mode & AI-powered Discovery for Higher Solution Visibility and Faster Buyer Decisions
AWS Marketplace has introduced a new Agent Mode, bringing conversational, AI-driven discovery directly into the buyer journey. Instead of relying on keyword searches or browsing long product catalogs, customers can now describe what they need in natural language, including their use case, technical constraints, or business goals. They can also ask follow-up questions, request deeper product insights, or upload documents to help narrow recommendations to the most relevant solutions. When a buyer is ready, they can initiate a purchase or instantly generate a detailed proposal to share internally for approvals.
Why this matters for you as a seller
Agent Mode lowers procurement friction, particularly for complex products like AI agents, integrated platforms, or multi-step services, by making evaluation more intuitive and context-aware. This shortens decision cycles and opens the door to buyers who may not be deeply technical.
More importantly, it increases your chances of being discovered. Instead of relying on perfect keywords, your solution can now surface based on a buyer’s intent, challenges, or architecture. This can put your listing into consideration sets that previously might have skipped over you.
Labra enhances agent mode effectiveness by optimizing your listings with cleaner metadata, taxonomy alignment, and structured attributes that improve how solutions surface in intent-based discovery. As buyers increasingly rely on conversational search instead of keywords, Labra ensures your listings are in the best shape to be recommended.
2. Express Private Offers For Instant, Automated Custom Pricing
AWS has rolled out express pivate offers, a major upgrade to how custom pricing gets created and delivered in AWS Marketplace. Instead of going through lengthy back-and-forth negotiations, sellers can predefine custom or discounted pricing, and the marketplace will automatically surface those tailored offers to eligible customers. Roman Kirsanov noted that more than 80% of Marketplace transactions are already self-service, and this feature pushes that trend even further.
Express POs use AI to generate and issue custom pricing in minutes instead of weeks, turning what used to be a slow, manual process into a near-instant, automated experience.
Why this matters for you as a seller
This shift puts speed and convenience at the center of deal-making. Express POs reduce the administrative drag that often slows down closing cycles and lets buyers move forward while their intent is high. It also increases the likelihood of capturing mid-to-large opportunities that previously stalled due to negotiation delays.
Labra already automates private offer workflows end-to-end, including creation, approvals, discounting, and CRM synchronization. With express private offers, Labra simply plugs into the new AI-generated pricing flow, automatically pulling those offers into your internal processes and triggering rules-based approval workflows. This lets sellers use express POs without changing their internal operations.
3. Flexible Payment Solutions For Real-world, Services-friendly Billing
AWS Marketplace now supports a much wider range of variable payment models, including time-and-materials, milestone-based billing, and usage-based structures. This applies not only to software but also to professional services and AI-agent offerings, giving sellers far more flexibility in how they package and charge for complex engagements.
Professional services work is rarely linear or perfectly predictable, which makes scoping and pricing upfront difficult. With variable payments, you can create private offers with a predetermined contract maximum and bill against it as work progresses. You can invoice customers based on completed milestones, actual time and materials consumed, or specific deliverables.
Why this matters for you as a seller
Variable payments make it easier for you to offer flexible, real-world billing for AI projects, managed services, consulting, and other custom work. It reduces friction for buyers, lets you bill based on actual progress or outcomes, and makes it simpler to manage multi-phase or uncertain projects without over-committing upfront. Ultimately, it encourages more enterprises to adopt combined SaaS + services packages.
Labra supports variable payments such as time-and-materials, milestone-based billing, and usage-based structures by enabling sellers to define contract maximums, track incremental billing, and manage all pricing models through private offers. Sellers can structure real-world services deals while maintaining clear visibility into consumption and invoicing across their buyer accounts.
4. Multi-product and Bundled Solutions For End-to-end Use Cases
AWS Marketplace has introduced multi-product solutions. These are pre-packaged bundles that combine multiple ISVs, professional services, and AWS services into one unified offer. Instead of customers stitching together dozens of tools and integrations on their own, they can now purchase a fully validated, end-to-end solution through a single lead partner. Each component can still have its own pricing and terms, but procurement, discovery, and implementation become dramatically simpler.
Why this matters for you as a seller
For ISVs, this opens the door to building richer, higher-value solutions by packaging your product with complementary third-party tools, your own professional services, or AWS first-party services. Channel partners can bundle the ISV products they’re authorized to resell. System integrators can create software-plus-services solutions that mirror how they deliver outcomes in the real world. Distributors can curate multi-ISV bundles they already manage. Across the board, each group gets a new way to offer integrated, ready-to-deploy solutions that customers can adopt faster and with far less complexity.
Labra already supports bundle-friendly workflows, including managing multi-product listings, coordinating multi-vendor co-sell motions, and automating approvals and private offers involving multiple ISVs. With AWS enabling public multi-product solution listings, Labra can orchestrate the lifecycle and sync metadata across vendors, offering deeper automation as new Partner Central APIs mature.
5. Agentic AI Competencies for Stronger Differentiation
AWS put major weight behind agentic AI and competency programs this year. Roman Kirsanov points out that customers working with competency partners are 30% more likely to get AI workloads into production and do it 25% faster, making competencies real economic levers rather than simple badges.
AWS also introduced three new Agentic AI competency categories (applications, tools, and consulting services). Partners who earn them will receive 50% more MDF and a dedicated specialization badge in AWS Marketplace.
Why this matters for you as a seller
Competencies now directly influence which partners customers trust and where AWS invests co-marketing dollars. For ISVs selling AI-powered products or services, these specializations will become meaningful differentiators in competitive Marketplace deals.
6. IAM Temporary Delegation for Faster, More Secure Customer Onboarding
AWS introduced IAM temporary delegation, which allows sellers to automate onboarding and deploy required resources directly into a customer’s AWS account without needing persistent access or manual permission wrangling. Customers retain full control and visibility over what’s deployed, while sellers gain a predictable, secure way to guide setup.
For complex deployments, especially AI agents, security tools, data platforms, and managed services, onboarding has traditionally been a major friction point. Customers often need to configure roles, policies, and resources correctly before the product even works. Temporary delegation reduces that burden by letting sellers drive a controlled, time-boxed setup workflow that aligns with enterprise security policies.
Why this matters for you as a seller
For sellers, the practical impact is significant: onboarding times drop from days or weeks to hours, support tickets tied to permissions or misconfigurations shrink, and deployments become far more consistent across customer environments. It also makes your solution much easier for regulated enterprises to adopt, since they get tight governance and full auditability without slowing the process down. Altogether, this means buyers can start using your product faster, and you can deliver value more reliably and at scale.
Labra can integrate IAM temporary delegation into sellers’ onboarding flows, allowing automated deployment of required resources into customer accounts while maintaining compliance and controlled access. This reduces setup friction, standardizes deployments, and gives buyers a cleaner, more secure onboarding experience—all orchestrated through Labra’s workflow engine.
7. Partner Central in the AWS Console for Unified Access and Automated Co-sell Operations
AWS has moved Partner Central directly into the AWS Management Console, giving you a single, secure place to access both Partner Central and the Marketplace Management Portal. This upgrade also introduces a full set of APIs that let you integrate Partner Central with your own internal systems, automate manual processes, and streamline how you manage co-sell motions, benefits, funding, and Marketplace operations.
- Built on AWS IAM, the new experience makes it much easier to give the right people access without workarounds or role constraints. You can use your existing SSO provider, set granular permissions, and scale your partner operations with enterprise-grade security.
- On the functionality side, AWS has expanded APIs across registration, partner profiles, solution listings, benefits, and the full co-sell lifecycle. With this, your systems can sync leads, opportunities, and deal progress automatically instead of relying on duplicate data entry.
- The enhanced Partner Assistant, now powered by Amazon Q, helps your teams get guidance and answers quickly.
- Finally, partners can now use Partner Central to publish multi-product, multi-vendor solutions for public discovery. This gives you a new, direct path to expand reach by taking advantage of the option to list multi-product solutions we spoke about earlier.
Labra integrates deeply with Marketplace and Partner Central APIs, and the newly expanded endpoints allow Labra to automate even more: deal sync, benefit applications, lead management, registration flows, solution publishing, and multi-vendor collaboration. Sellers get a unified, automated co-sell and Marketplace operations engine that mirrors the new Partner Central experience.
8. Updated Partner Incentives for Better Transaction Rewards
- AWS introduced new Partner Growth and New Customer incentives that consolidate older programs and make financial rewards easier to track.
- You can now get both discounts and cash payouts on private-pricing and resell deals, including on smaller deals that previously didn’t qualify.
- Deal-registration protection ensures sellers who do the early presales work still receive higher incentives even if another partner closes the deal.
- Omedia’s updated research shows partners/sellers now generate $7.13 in services revenue for every $1 of AWS spend they influence, a higher multiplier than previous years.
- Sellers offering managed services, AI, cybersecurity, or government-sector solutions will receive expanded margins and stronger incentives under the updated programs.
re:Invent always delivers, and this year’s announcements are no exception. Buyers now get a smoother, faster path to adoption, and sellers get a far more leveraged platform to scale.
As you plan for 2026, the real opportunity isn’t just listing more products. It’s using these new capabilities to your advantage. Package richer end-to-end solutions, adopt flexible services billing, double down on AI competencies, and turn 2026 into a year that meaningfully moves the needle.
