How Intuit built an agentic disaster recovery assistant with Amazon Bedrock

Automating complex disaster recovery processes with natural language is now within reach for development teams everywhere. The AWS Machine Learning team recently detailed how Intuit engineered an agentic disaster recovery assistant, named EWOK Agent, leveraging Amazon Bedrock. This system allows on-call engineers to initiate critical production failovers using simple, plain-language commands, while simultaneously ensuring every action remains audited, policy-compliant, and fundamentally secure. Essentially, it translates human intent into orchestrated, safe, and verifiable recovery actions, reducing stress and human error during high-stakes situations. This innovation directly impacts how organizations of all sizes can approach resilience and operational continuity. Consider a logistics startup in Chicago, managing complex supply chains. Instead of a multi-step manual failover procedure requiring specific console access and tribal knowledge, their operations manager could simply request, "Initiate failover for the inventory tracking service to the Oregon region," and trust the agent to execute safely and log everything. For an internal IT team at a mid-size financial services firm in New York City, which might struggle with audit requirements for DR, such an agent ensures every step of a failover from their secondary data center is not only automated but also meticulously documented for compliance. Even an indie SaaS founder in Austin, whose primary concern is minimizing downtime for their niche analytics platform, could leverage this approach to significantly reduce the cognitive load and potential for error during an unexpected outage. To explore this concept, dedicate a few hours this week to drafting a simple, structured prompt for a hypothetical critical system failover scenario your team might face. Then, outline the specific, step-by-step actions that would need to be taken manually. Finally, research how a tool like AWS Step Functions or similar orchestration services, combined with a foundational model, could be used to automate these steps, considering the security and auditability aspects outlined by Intuit's example. This exercise will highlight potential areas for agentic automation within your own operational workflows.