AWS Marketplace's agent shelf quadrupled to 4,000. The people who close the big deals are still there

A keyword's rank is ordinal, and ordinal numbers hide volume. Third place means the phrase passed 61 others in the search log ^[1][21]; it does not say how many buyers typed it, or what any of them signed. The listing count is the sturdier number: about 1,000 agent offerings a year ago against more than 4,000 now ^[2], a net 3,000 additions in twelve months ^[11] and roughly a tenth of a catalogue that is approaching 40,000 applications ^[3][4].

Supply that grows fourfold in a year ^[12] runs straight into how the discovery layer behaves. Shashi Bellamkonda of Info-Tech Research Group says agent-driven search "may only look at less than 70% of the solutions available", and attributes that to model behaviour rather than anything AWS built ^[8]. His remedy is manual: reprompt, add detail, and treat what comes back as a high-quality draft rather than a finished decision, reviewed by a person ^[10]. That is the discovery gain and the discovery tax in the same paragraph. The buyer stops reading category pages and starts doing recall work on the model's behalf.

The boundary between machine work and paid work is drawn fairly precisely in the reporting. Bret Greenstein of West Monroe Partners lists what marketplaces now absorb: discovery, vendor comparison, licensing, entitlement management, auditing, renewals, and parts of contracting and procurement ^[7]. AWS's Matt Yanchyshyn says the support extends past discovery into deployment, with due diligence a heavy adoption area beyond pricing and transactions ^[5], and describes the agentic layer as being about customer success, private pricing and supporting bigger deals ^[13]. Note the verb. Supporting bigger deals is not closing them, and the plain self-service click-and-go path still covers much of the marketplace ^[18].

The money forecast is worth doing by hand. Market Intelo puts agentic procurement software at $1.2 billion in 2025, growing 24% a year to nearly $9 billion by 2034 ^[14]. Compound 24% across the nine years from 2025 and $1.2 billion lands at about $8.3 billion ^[15]; getting to $9 billion needs about 25.1% ^[16]. The gap is small, and it is the kind of slack that suggests the headline figure and the growth rate were fitted to each other rather than derived from the same data. Either way, take the rate at face value and the spend on this category grows about a quarter a year while one marketplace's agent shelf grew fourfold in one ^[17]. Sellers are arriving faster than the budget is, which is a crowding story, and crowding is settled by whatever ranks answers.