Infrastructure launches IgniteAI Agent for Canvas, builds on Amazon Bedrock

Infrastructure, the company behind the Canvas learning management system (LMS) launched the IgniteAI Agent, which orchestrates and executes workflows for educators and administrators. Infrastructure said that IgniteAI is built on Amazon Bedrock.

The launch indicates that education is moving more toward AI tools. Infrastructure was looking to roll out AI tools that were embedded in its applications securely. Infrastructure's IgniteAI suite, launched in July, aims to make tasks such as building modules, pages and content creation more automated.

Shiren Vijiasingam, chief product officer at Infrastructure, said Ignite AI "moves us beyond generic content creation to true agentic support." IgniteAI Agent is in the early adopter phase.

IgniteAI Agent does the following:

• Builds modules, design pages, and content creation.
• Automates rubric generation and discussion reviews.
• Organize workflows such as creating and organizing course modules, adjust due dates and find complementary content.
• Collaborate with other agents and the Canvas ecosystem.

As a Canvas user, I'm looking forward to giving IgniteAI a spin to clean up courses, adjust due dates and spin up modules since those tasks eat up time.

Infrastructure built IgniteAI Agent to adopt the privacy-first framework used in Canvas. The framework has a closed-loop architecture that ensures AI interactions stay within the institution’s environment, strict opt-in controls for the institutional, department and course levels and transparency into what models are in use and accessing data.

According to Infrastructure, IgniteAI Agent will be available at no cost for US Canvas customers through June 30 with global free access through Sept. 30 for countries outside the US.

AWS' role

Although IgniteAI Agent is the headliner and likely interface to much of the IgniteAI Suite for Canvas, AWS detailed the work between the two companies in July.

In a blog post, AWS said Canvas was looking to collapse the steps needed for educational workflows.

IgniteAI Agent integrates more than 500 APIs available through Canvas and gives instructors the ability to preview the steps and verify the output.

Other takeaways on how Infrastructure is using Amazon Bedrock for IgniteAI Agent and Ignite AI include:

• Infrastructure is using Amazon Bedrock's regional hosting to keep student data in-region.
• Regional hosting also means student data isn't used for model training or development.
• AWS advised Infrastructure on using a variety of large language models and helped refine prompts.
• Infrastructure used the AWS Product Acceleration team to scale up a beta and move to production.
• IgniteAI Agent uses Anthropic Claude and Model Context Protocol.

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• Accenture goes big on AI reskilling, acquires Udacity, launches LearnVantage