TL;DR
AWS has announced Nova 2, a new AI model family delivering what Amazon claims is industry-leading price-performance across reasoning, multimodal processing, and agentic tasks. Nova Act achieves 90% reliability on browser automation workflows, while Nova Forge lets organisations create custom “Novella” models using their proprietary data.
Nova 2 Family Spans Four Specialisations
Amazon’s Nova 2 family comprises four models targeting different use cases. Nova 2 Lite offers fast, cost-effective reasoning for everyday workloads, allowing users to adjust how much “thinking” the model performs before responding. Amazon claims it equals or beats Claude Haiku, GPT-5 Mini, and Gemini Flash on most benchmarks.
Nova 2 Pro serves as Amazon’s most intelligent reasoning model, processing text, images, video, and speech. Designed for complex agentic coding and sophisticated problem-solving, it can also serve as a “teacher” for distilling capabilities into smaller models. Amazon claims competitive performance against Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.1, and Gemini 3 Pro Preview.
Nova 2 Sonic unifies speech understanding and generation for real-time conversational AI, featuring a one-million token context window and seamless integration with Amazon Connect and telephony providers. Nova 2 Omni represents an industry first—a unified model processing text, images, video, and speech while generating both text and images, handling up to 750,000 words in a single context.
Organisations including Cisco, Siemens, Sumo Logic, and Trellix are already using Nova 2 for applications from threat detection to voice AI assistants.
Nova Forge and Nova Act Transform Enterprise AI
Nova Forge addresses a persistent enterprise challenge: how to deeply integrate proprietary knowledge into AI without expensive ground-up training. The service allows organisations to build custom “Novellas” by blending their data with Nova’s capabilities through what Amazon calls “open training”—access to pre-trained, mid-trained, and post-trained model checkpoints.
Reddit CTO Chris Slowe said Nova Forge is “allowing us to improve content moderation on Reddit with a more unified system that’s already delivering impressive results.”
Nova Act targets browser-based automation, achieving what Amazon claims is 90% reliability on customer workflows—trained through reinforcement learning across thousands of simulated web environments. Hertz reportedly accelerated software delivery by 5x using Nova Act for automated testing, while 1Password integrated it to reduce manual login steps across hundreds of websites.
Looking Forward
With Nova 2, Amazon is making a significant push into the enterprise AI market, positioning its models against offerings from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. The combination of competitive foundation models, custom training through Forge, and practical automation through Act represents a comprehensive enterprise AI stack. Whether these capabilities match Amazon’s benchmark claims in production environments will determine if Nova 2 shifts the competitive landscape.
Source: Amazon