Depending on geography, between 7% and 12% of SMB and midmarket buyers use a cloud marketplace to discover software. The rest arrive at AWS Marketplace, or at any of its competitors, already decided. A partner or an ISV brings them, and they transact there for contract consolidation, committed-spend drawdown, and procurement governance rather than for anything resembling search.
Call it the Discovery Deficit. Cloud marketplaces have functioned as procurement rails, not demand engines. They close deals that were originated somewhere else, by someone else, usually a partner.
That gap is why the AWS Marketplace agentic procurement announcements matter, and it is also why most coverage is aimed at the wrong question. Whether AI improves marketplace search is not interesting. Whether a marketplace that has never originated demand in the smaller segments can begin to do so, once the buyer stops being a person typing keywords, is a different question entirely, with different consequences for everyone downstream.
Three changes, and what each one is actually buying
AWS Marketplace has made three structural changes that are easy to read as feature releases. Read against the Discovery Deficit, each is doing something more specific.
The first is the replacement of lexical search with conversational discovery. Agent Mode, launched at re:Invent 2025, lets a buyer describe a requirement in natural language, upload an RFP or a requirements document, and receive ranked recommendations with side-by-side comparisons. Conversational search converts better than keyword search, which is unsurprising. The more important change is in what the interface is for. A keyword catalog fulfills a decision the buyer already made, and works only for someone who knows what to type. A conversational one helps make the decision, and deciding is the step SMB and midmarket buyers have always outsourced, because they have no procurement function to run comparative analysis internally. That is also why so few of them discover software in a marketplace: a catalog that cannot help you decide is little use to someone who cannot decide alone.
The second is building for machines to read rather than people. Most web pages assemble themselves in the browser, so a crawler or an agent that arrives sees almost nothing. AWS builds Marketplace pages to arrive complete, which means an agent reading one gets the whole listing. It has also opened the catalog to direct queries through an MCP server, so a buyer's own AI assistant can ask it questions without visiting a page at all. Most platforms building AI discovery are building a destination and trying to keep the buyer inside it. AWS is doing close to the opposite, and that choice says more about the strategy than anything else in the set. Making the catalog legible to agents AWS does not own is a distribution choice rather than an experience choice, and it concedes that the buyer's first conversation about software will happen somewhere else. The competitive unit shifts accordingly, from whose marketplace interface is best to whose catalog is most readable by someone else's agent.
The third is the automation of the transaction, which arrives from two directions at once. Express Private Offers let a seller define rate cards, discount tiers, volume breaks, and qualification criteria in advance, so an offer can be generated and accepted without a human negotiating it, which lowers the cost of serving a small software deal. In June 2026, AWS cut its professional services listing fee from 2.5% to 0.5%, and takes it to zero where those services are bundled into a multi-product solution or attached to a Migration Acceleration Program engagement, which lowers the cost of attaching services to that same deal. Multi-product solutions then let software, third-party components, and professional services sit in one listing under one procurement flow. A fee that vanishes at the exact moment services are attached to software is a routing incentive rather than price relief, and it routes toward the bundled listing as the default unit of sale. All of this aims at deals neither AWS nor its partners could previously work economically, which are the same deals where the Discovery Deficit lives.
Individually these read as product announcements; together they describe a platform trying to convert itself from a procurement rail into a demand engine, which is a considerably harder thing to be.
The Composed Shelf
