Adrian Bird, Author at Robots & Pencils https://robotsandpencils.com/author/adrian-birdrobotsandpencils-com/ Digital Innovation Firm Mon, 25 May 2026 20:46:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.4 https://robotsandpencils.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/favicon_rap.png Adrian Bird, Author at Robots & Pencils https://robotsandpencils.com/author/adrian-birdrobotsandpencils-com/ 32 32 We Took a Real Problem into the Amazon Quick Hackathon. It Delivered. https://robotsandpencils.com/amazon-quick-partner-hackathon/ Fri, 22 May 2026 16:35:42 +0000 https://robotsandpencils.com/?p=3378 I spent last Tuesday at Amazon’s ORD11 office with five colleagues from Robots & Pencils, building on Amazon Quick for the day.   The Problem We Brought In  We brought a live use case from one of our enterprise customers, a regulated utility dealing with alarm overload, aging infrastructure they must migrate off by 2028, and the steady departure of the […]

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]]> I spent last Tuesday at Amazon’s ORD11 office with five colleagues from Robots & Pencils, building on Amazon Quick for the day.  

The Problem We Brought In 

We brought a live use case from one of our enterprise customers, a regulated utility dealing with alarm overload, aging infrastructure they must migrate off by 2028, and the steady departure of the asset experts who know how all of it really works. 

Robots & Pencils at AWS Amazon Quick Hackathon
Photo by Scott Young: Pictured L-R Lisa Bayne, Stefan Deusch, Alex Shumski, Saul Delage, Adrian Bird

What We Built (And What Surprised Me!) 

By the end of the day we had a working end-to-end agentic workflow that includes a dashboard pulling device telemetry into one view, an agent that triages incoming alerts and recommends what to do about them, and a knowledge base that captures the kind of expertise that usually walks out the door when someone retires. It’s nowhere near production, but it’s enough that we are ready to sit down with the customer next week and have a concrete concept discussion instead of a whiteboard one. That’s the part that surprised me most. 

We were also lucky enough to be recognized as one of the winning partners on the day, which was a nice bonus. 

Robots & Pencils at AWS Amazon Quick Hackathon
Photo by Scott Young: Pictured L-R Lisa Bayne, Stefan Deusch, Adrian Bird, Alex Shumski, Saul Delage

A Few Thanks 

A few thanks are in order. Naresh Rajaram, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect at AWS, ran a genuinely well-organized event. Every detail was thought through. Neal Cauley’s framing of where Amazon Quick is heading was probably the most useful 30 minutes of the day for me, and it connected back to what Rima Olinger, World Wide Director Data & AI GTM – Amazon Quick, has been sharing publicly about how Amazon itself is using the product internally. Worth reading if you haven’t. Thanks also to the AWS team for inviting us and to the Quick specialists who sat at our table and helped us push further than we would have on our own. 

Looking forward to the next one. 

Robots & Pencils is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and AWS Pattern Partner. Request an AI Briefing today.  


About the Author 

Adrian Bird is Vice President of AWS Partnership at Robots & Pencils, where he leads the company’s AWS Partner strategy and execution, expanding joint customer engagement, and strengthening alignment with AWS teams. Connect with Adrian.

The post We Took a Real Problem into the Amazon Quick Hackathon. It Delivered. appeared first on Robots & Pencils.

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