Todd Fortier

Todd Fortier is a Senior Prototyping Solutions Architect at AWS who builds AI-powered systems by day and turns the best conversations into content by night.

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Picture a group of agents probing your environment at once. Your controls can stay the same. Your reaction time can't.

Nivas Durairaj, Principal WW Specialist for Governance at AWS, on why visibility into agent activity is the new pressure point.

https://t.co/nIm4Cuhlni
#AIGovernance

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

"It requires humility. It requires a willingness to say, I don't know, but I'll figure it out."

Rachel Lockner, a Senior Customer Solutions Manager at AWS, came to AI from the business side. Her way to learn it: ask the AI how to use the AI.

https://t.co/JQNcuqELcb
#GenAI

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Amazon spent years pulling human approval gates out of its deploy pipelines. Gen AI apps are back at that starting line.

Chris Paton on getting there the same way: evals wired into CI/CD until "you have faith in your test suite."

https://t.co/f2ZDm4ZYBf
#AIEvals #LLMOps

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

"If it is faster than the day before, probably something that was supposed to happen didn't happen."

Luis Guirigay on testing performance daily against a baseline and investigating drift either way, faster included.

https://t.co/p00nAe5G1B
#SRE #LoadTesting

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

A prototype left running in a sandbox account. Then, "two years later, somebody doing an audit" finds the bill.

Peter DeVries on leasing AWS accounts with a budget and an end date, then wiping and recycling them.

https://t.co/5nHYAYsDHQ
#FinOps

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Frontier models keep getting better. Anshul Gang's take: "the frontier models are not necessarily the moat here."

The edge comes from the context your specialists feed them.

https://t.co/7ptNb09KfX

#AgenticAI #TechBites

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Trisha Janowicz, Principal ProServe Account Executive at AWS, works with some of the most regulated customers in financial services, and at the NY Tech Summit she described the stock exchanges and market infrastructure teams she supports like this:

"They can't afford to fail, not even for zero seconds."

That line stuck with me because so much of the AI conversation right now is about speed. Trisha hears it too, with customers asking how much faster AI can get a project done. Her answer for this crowd is that the order of operations matters. A resilient, secure foundation comes first, and the AI workloads go on top of it.

If you build for a business where downtime makes the news, her short is a good gut check (my own opinion).

https://t.co/4HqZT8atCl

#AWS #TechBites #AgenticAI

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Roland Barcia, Director, Specialist SA & Tech at AWS, told me at the NY Tech Summit that cloud native trained a lot of us to standardize everything, and AI nudges the other way. His view is that most teams don't fail fast enough, and AI makes small experiments cheap enough to run. His short is worth a few minutes (my own opinion).

https://t.co/GS4OMiQMcF

#AWS #AgenticAI #Prototyping

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

"I have an automation that runs every Monday, basically reads through all of my threads with Codex and just gives me coaching."

Peter Diamond lets the AI review how he worked last week. I'm stealing this one.

#AIBuilders #GenAI #TechBites

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Bernie Valderrama, WW Specialist SA for Amazon Connect at AWS, reminded me at the NY Tech Summit how much signal most companies already have on their customers:

"They know the last time they purchased something, they know when they've been on their website and what they were doing there."

Good few minutes (my own opinion).

https://t.co/4HqZT8atCl

#AWS #TechBites #MachineLearning

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Harleen Kaur, Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, spends a lot of her time in cost conversations with teams building on generative AI, and at the NY Tech Summit she passed along the version she hears most:

"People are using these big models and my costs are just increasing. How do I stop it?"

I hear some flavor of that in almost every customer room lately. Harleen's answer is to watch spend while it happens instead of reading about it in next month's report. Put a layer in front of your model traffic that tracks usage in real time, and you can budget per project, per user, or per provider.

She pairs that with limits on the agents themselves, like how many steps you let one take before it stops and asks. If you're the person who gets the bill, her short is worth a few minutes (my own opinion).

https://t.co/qROo3Q2coc

#AWS #AgenticAI #TechBites

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

"If somebody compromises your cloud account, they are taking out your entire high availability capability."

Doug Neumann on why HA and DR are two different problems. Redundancy won't save you from a bad actor.

#DisasterRecovery #CloudSecurity #TechBites

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Sudipt Kapadia, Director, Solutions Architecture, US FSI, AWS, told me at the NY Tech Summit that his advice for SAs right now is to put on the business hat. Agents automate a real business process, so knowing that process is becoming the job.

His short is right here, worth a few minutes (my own opinion):

https://t.co/mLhSeqRQOk

#AWS #TechBites #AgenticAI

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Renee Lau, FSI Specialist for Capital Markets at AWS Industries, has talked with customers who have thousands of employees and real resistance to AI. Her read at the NY Tech Summit was kind: most of it is unfamiliarity, plus some honest job anxiety. Her short is a good one to send a hesitant teammate (my own opinion).

https://t.co/rYiO5nUMFQ

#AWS #TechBites #AgenticAI

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

"If you think about an agent and what they do, it automates a key business process."

Sudipt Kapadia on why the SA role is evolving into much more of a business leader.

#SolutionsArchitecture #AgenticAI #TechBites

[Emilio Monti @emilmont]

From Literature to Experiments: An AI Researcher on AWS.
https://t.co/24jDJXDNGc

Inspired by @karpathy's autoresearch and LLM Wiki.

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Colleen Haddleton, Program Manager on AGS Tech at AWS, gave me a take on frugality at the NY Tech Summit that I keep chewing on. She treats it as a time strategy as much as a money one: be frugal where you aren't the owner, and invest where you are.

Her short is a quick watch (my own opinion).

https://t.co/BeglE9oBlw

#AWS #TechBites #Prototyping

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Luis Guirigay, WW Specialists Solutions Leader at AWS, came on Tech Bites to talk performance engineering, and one line of his has been rattling around my head all week with the holiday traffic season coming up:

"Humans, we go to sleep, agents do not."

His point is that agents are a different traffic shape. A person hits a slow page and waits or leaves. An agent has no think time and just keeps retrying, right through the 429s. So if your load tests only script human behavior, you're planning for half your future traffic.

Luis also reminded me that auto scaling has limits and takes time to react. He suggests knowing three numbers for your system: the load you always need to handle, where it starts to degrade, and where it breaks. Then test daily and investigate drift in either direction (my own opinion).

If you own reliability for anything customer facing, the episode is worth your time.

https://t.co/dPYJx3K0zL

#AWS #TechBites #AgenticAI

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Rachel Lockner, Senior Customer Solutions Manager at AWS Industries, comes to AI from the business side, and she told me at the NY Tech Summit that if she can build an app in Kiro in about twenty minutes, anybody can. Her advice is to start with the process and the outcome, then pick the tool (my own opinion).

https://t.co/NVnpodBuZP

#AWS #Prototyping #TechBites

[Todd Fortier @tierfour_]

Nivas Durairaj, Principal WW Specialist, Governance, AWS, gave me the most reassuring take on agent governance I heard at the NY Tech Summit. The controls you already run still hold. What changes is the clock:

"We need to react faster, we need to have more visibility."

Good few minutes (my own opinion).

https://t.co/nIm4Cuhlni

#AWS #AgenticAI #TechBites