Trip Report | BeSA Q1 2026 Agentic AI on AWS Cohort

Summary we sent to our leadership

Hey, Prasad here 👋 I’m the voice behind the weekly newsletter “Big Tech Careers.”

In this week’s article, I share the report of the recent BeSA Q1 2026 cohort we completed on Agentic AI on AWS. It includes the exact report we sent to our leadership.

If you like the article, click the ❤️ icon. That helps me know you enjoy reading my content.

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After every customer event, we send out an internal Trip Report. BeSA is more of a community event — but given the scale and impact of the Q1 2026 Cohort on Agentic AI on AWS, we felt it deserved one too.

This cohort had some standout moments: free hands-on workshop environments for thousands of participants every week, and community volunteers who stepped up to help people get through the workshops.

What really moved us, though, were the participant quotes like:

• “Mastered Agentic AI from Kenya.”

• “The BeSA program made me realize how capable I am.”

• “I’m ill with fever but still not missing this for the world.”

• “This program gave me a lot of motivation during a tough time.”

Below is the Trip Report we shared with our teams and leadership.

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About BeSA

BeSA (Become a Solutions Architect) is a free, community-driven 6-week mentoring program run by AWS professionals that helps aspiring cloud practitioners develop both the technical and behavioral skills needed to excel in their cloud and AI career journey. Since its inception in 2022, BeSA has trained 23,000+ learners across 9 cohorts through live-streamed sessions featuring presentations, role-plays, hands-on workshops, and guest speakers from across the industry. The program is live streamed every Saturday, and all sessions are recorded and posted on the BeSA YouTube channel.

Cohort Details and Statistics

Program: BeSA (Become a Solutions Architect) Cohort 9

Total registration: 10,895

• Personal Learning: 5,727 (52.6%)

• AWS Customer: 1,497 (13.7%)

• AWS Partner: 1,453 (13.3%)

• AWS/Amazon Employees: 369 (3.4%)

• Potential AWS customer: 415 (3.8%)

• Others: 1,434 (13.2%)

Topics covered:

• Technical Track: Agentic AI on AWS

• Behavioral Track: Developing the SA Mindset in the AI Era

• Hands-on Track: Level 200/300 AWS workshops on Amazon Bedrock, Strands Agents, Bedrock AgentCore, MCP and Kiro

Logistics:

• Dates: February 21 - March 28, 2026

• Livestream time: 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM GMT (every Saturday)

• Workshop access duration: 24 hours over the weekends

• Platform: YouTube Livestream + Discord + AWS Workshop Studio (Hands-On Labs)

Participation engagement:

• Total YouTube views: 98,500+ (as of 5^th April 2026)

• Total badges claimed: 7,485

• Total Workshops completed: 6136

Weekly Agenda and Statistics:

What Worked Well

• The Agentic AI theme was timely and resonated strongly with participants

• The role-play session format of interaction between an AWS expert and customer was appreciated— the customer voice represented the audience, making it easy to relate to

• Technical, behavioural, and hands-on tracks gave participants the depth they needed to understand what to build, why it matters, and how to approach it

• Hands-on AWS Workshop Studio labs gave participants real-world experience building agentic AI applications on AWS. A live pre-workshop overview and recorded walkthrough helped everyone navigate the workshops with confidence

• The virtual format enabled global participation across different time zones, with multiple workshop slots to accommodate different regions

• This cohort, we also welcomed community volunteers from around the world to support participants on Discord. By the end of the cohort, we had 40+ volunteers who helped in keeping this community self-sufficient and thriving

• Live Q&A and chat support on YouTube, backed by AWS volunteers and an active Discord community, provided real-time answers and peer support throughout the workshops

• Post-session knowledge checks and digital badges helped reinforce key concepts — and participants were proud to share their credentials on LinkedIn

• Our partnership with Whizlabs offered complementary structured learning and free AWS Generative AI labs to extend the experience beyond the sessions

What Can be Improved

• Workshop access duration can be increased. Participants requested access to workshops on weekdays as well, since committing to 6 consecutive weekends for hands-on workshops can be difficult

• Consolidate the different platforms used for registrations, hands-on workshops, knowledge checks, chat support, email, and badges into one cohesive experience

• Engage the community and keep it active after the BeSA cohort ends

• Make the BeSA Badges and Certificate credible and verifiable on platforms like Credly

• Continue providing access to Whizlabs learning resources after the batch ends

• Expand reach of BeSA on social media platforms beyond LinkedIn

Participant Quotes and Feedback

AI Generated Summary – “From the very first session, participants made clear that BeSA Batch 09 was something special. The overwhelming sentiment throughout was one of gratitude, inspiration, and genuine connection — remarkable for a free volunteer-run program delivered entirely over YouTube Live. Participants consistently praised the role-play teaching format as the program’s defining strength. Rather than traditional lectures, BeSA paired technical presenters with co-hosts who played customer or SA roles, creating dynamic conversations that made complex Agentic AI concepts feel tangible and relatable. As one participant put it, “Always liked the dialogue mode of presenting than monologue” The volunteer team’s dedication was the most emotionally resonant theme across all six weeks. Participants were visible moved that AWS employees were donating their weekends to deliver high-quality , free training at global scale. Comments like “Not all heroes wear capes,” and “You all give your 200% and even giving away all these for FREE — just mind blowing” appeared weekly .

The impact extended well beyond technical upskilling, with participants sharing powerful personal testimonials — from “Mastered Agentic AI from Kenya” to “The BESA program made me realize how capable I am” — while emotional investment deepened each week, evolving from Week 1’s excited curiosity (”I am ill with fever but still not going to miss this for the world”) to Week 6’s heartfelt farewells (”This program gave me lot of motivation in tough time,” “Missing these energetic Saturday mornings,” and “Your dedication and compromise to share your knowledge has no price”). The strongest sentiment signal came not from praise but from action — participants organically forming study groups across countries, requesting BeSA T-shirts as community identity, and repeatedly asking “When is the next cohort?” and “How do I volunteer?” — confirming that BeSA had built not just a training program but a lasting global community that participants don’t want to leave.”

• “From Foundations of AI Agents to Building with Agentic AI, I gained hands-on exposure to designing intelligent systems. One of the most valuable parts of this program was the hands-on sessions, which made a huge difference in truly understanding the concepts and applying them in real-world scenarios. Looking forward to applying these learnings to build scalable, intelligent, and impactful AI-driven solutions.” - Chaitali Kayastha, Software Engineer, JP Morgan Chase

• “I am truly amazed by the impact you have had on the community. I have never witnessed such dedication or such a high-quality program made available to professionals at no cost. This is a truly selfless act, and the one word that comes to mind is simply: Gratitude.” - Jaypal Baviskar, Solutions Architect, Cisco

• “This wasn’t your run of the mill webinar series, it was a three-track program that focused on; technical deep dives, the Solutions Architect’s mindset, and weekly hands-on labs, all led by tenured AWS practitioners. I loved the opportunity to build, break things, debug, and then build again” - Paul Madojutimi, Technical Project Manager, Apple

• “I just completed 6 weeks of Agentic AI on AWS with the BeSA program — led by Amazonians. What made BeSA different: Each week ended with a hands-on workshop — of actually building and deploying on AWS. That’s what made concepts stick, role-play learning with AWS experts making complex concepts tangible, a global cohort, thoughtful mentors, and zero cost to participants” - Inderpal Singh, Cloud Architect, Accenture

• “I have been to many workshop and registered for many courses but was not able to build rapo/ professional relationship. BeSA stands tall with the content, vocabulary and no toy projects. Great Job by entire BeSA team for putting for all your effort with content” - Ashok Vaddepally, Senior Cloud Devops Engineer, CGI

• “I found myself shifting from a developer mindset focused on “How do I build this?” to thinking like an architect asking “Why should this be built this way?” and “What if we approached it differently?” - Neetika Yadav, Senior Power Engineer, Transport for London

• “Over the past 6 weeks, I had the opportunity to complete an outstanding program on Agentic AI, led by senior AWS architects. It stands out as one of the most well-structured programs among leading hyperscalers, taking me from conceptual understanding to hands-on building with AWS Bedrock, Strands, AgentCore, MCP, and Kiro spec-driven development. With 12 hours of live sessions and ~50 hours of AWS resources provisioned for hands-on practice, the program blends solution architecture learning with the behavioral mindset required to design, build, and operationalize Agentic systems at scale in enterprise environments.” - Anand Parthasarathy, Sr. Technology Delivery Lead, Accenture

• “I thought I was learning how to build AI agents… but somewhere in those 6 weeks, the real transformation happened — I started thinking like an architect, not just a developer.” - Guru Ganesh Chintalapudi, SDE-3 ZF Tech

Special Thanks and Recognitions

AWS Leadership Support

• Rohan Karmarkar (Director, Partner Technology) for the sponsorship and support.

• Roland Barcia (Director, Specialist SA and Tech) for approval to use workshop studio for the community and also for the keynote fireside chat.

• Swami Sivasubramanian (VP, AWS AI) for recording a welcome video to kickstart the cohort and promoting BeSA on X

• Jeff Barr (VP, AWS Evangelism), Ruba Borno (VP, AWS Specialists & Partners), Julia Chen (VP, AWS Partner Core) for the support and sharing about BeSA on LinkedIn. Helped us to get 10,000+ registrations.

Cohort 9 Volunteers

Jeff Escott, Aanchal Agrawal, Nisha Dekhtawala, Raj Menon, Dr. Anil Kumar Giri, Kavya Sidda, Anmol Katakwar, Chris Poole, Laura Smith, Kavya Gopi, Bhaskar Pathak, Santosh Setty, Thomas Utsey, Asheesh Pandey, Vijender Singh

Workshop Studio, Service team and workshop owners

• AWS Workshop Studio Team — <names redacted>

• Amazon Bedrock Team — <names redacted>

• Nova Pro Team — <names redacted>

• Kiro Team — <names redacted>

• Workshop owners - <names redacted>

Core Team Members

Parna Mehta, Ashish Prajapati, Prasad Rao

What’s Next

• Make the Agentic AI on AWS cohort self-service for the community.

• The next cohort of BeSA will be planned for Q3 2026.

• Incorporate the feedback to consolidate different platforms to simplify the experience.

• Scale to 20,000 participants for the next cohort.

- BeSA Core Team
[Parna Mehta, Ashish Prajapati, Prasad Rao]

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That was the Trip Report — but we also want to take a moment to thank a few people and platforms who made this possible.

TechCreator.io

Hosting BeSA on Zach Wilson’s TechCreator platform was a game-changer for us. It handled our weekly knowledge checks, gave out badges to everyone who passed, and issued certificates at the end of the six-week cohort. The result? Hundreds of people proudly sharing their badges on LinkedIn every week.

We’re taking this further — the Agentic AI on AWS cohort will soon be fully self-serve on TechCreator. Participants will be able to register, enroll, watch videos, complete knowledge checks, and claim their badges and certificates, all in one place. There’ll also be a Discord channel for the community to connect and get questions answered. And yes — it’ll all be free.

Thank you, Zach Wilson for offering the platform at no cost and helping us make such a big impact. 🙏

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Whizlabs

I first met Whizlabs CEO Krishna Srinivasan last year at re:Invent, though we’d been exchanging emails for over a year — so the in-person meetup was long overdue. When I told him about the cohort we were planning, he didn’t hesitate. He talked about how passionate he is about building community, and offered free access to Whizlabs’ Amazon Bedrock course and labs for all BeSA participants — committing to 10,000+ people.

One of the best signs of how good the platform was? Participants kept asking for extended access even after the cohort ended.

Thank you, Krishna. 🙏

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Community Volunteers

Week 1 gave us the kind of problem everyone hopes for — things breaking because the interest was far beyond what we expected. We had committed to 24-hour workshop coverage, but supporting 1,000+ people at once was something we hadn’t planned for. We had around five volunteers lined up, but ended up pulling an all-nighter just to keep up with the non-stop questions pouring in on Discord. By the time it was over, we knew we needed to scale volunteers 10x before the next week.

And that’s exactly what happened. The community rose to the occasion.

The BeSA community volunteer success belongs to 40+ of them.

40+ volunteers. 1,000+ participants. 24 hours of workshop coverage. Every single weekend.

They were BeSA participants themselves — people who had done the workshops, worked through the hard parts, and figured things out. And then turned around and helped others do the same. On their weekends. On their own time. With zero obligation.

Running a completely free cohort on Agentic AI for thousands of people would simply not have been possible without them.

Thank you. Each and every one of you. 🙏💙

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