AWS Step Functions adds AgentCore-powered agentic reasoning step

AWS Step Functions now enables you to add AI agent reasoning steps to your workflow through an optimized integration with the managed harness (currently in preview) in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. AWS Step Functions is a visual workflow service that orchestrates AWS services with built-in error handling, parallel execution, and human approval steps. The AgentCore harness lets you declare an agent through configuration where you specify the model, tools, and behavior. AgentCore provides the managed environment that runs the agent loop end-to-end.

With this integration, you can automate reasoning tasks in your workflow such as classifying a document or extracting elements from an unstructured form. You can run multiple agents in parallel or in sequence at different decision points in a single workflow and add human approval before critical actions. The workflow execution history shows agent input, output, token usage, and duration with links to agent turn details in Amazon CloudWatch, so you can trace and audit every agent decision. You can reuse an existing harness or create a new one directly from the Workflow Studio, the Step Functions visual builder. With per-invocation overrides such as the model, system prompt, and tools, you can adapt the agent to each workflow context without duplicating configurations. Agent context can be persisted across invocations using a session ID that works within or across workflow executions.

The harness integration is available in the following AWS Regions where the AgentCore harness preview is available: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Sydney). Standard Step Functions pricing applies for workflow execution with no additional integration charges, and standard Amazon Bedrock and AgentCore pricing applies for model inference and associated AgentCore resources.

To learn more about adding agentic reasoning to your workflows, visit AWS Step Functions documentation.