In September, we launched Nova Act extension, a tool that transforms how you build AI agents with Nova Act by bringing the entire agent developer experience directly into integrated development environments (IDEs) like Visual Studio Code, Kiro, and Cursor. Since then, developers have been using Nova Act extension’s capabilities to build complex, highly reliable agents faster than before. With the extension, we’re able to help even more developers and customers deploy agents in real-world environments. The extension lets you build, test, and deploy in one place with natural-language prompts, live browser debugging, and step-by-step script execution. You can use it to fill forms, extract data, make bookings, or run quality checks without switching tools.
Let’s look at how Hertz, First Orion, and Automation Anywhere are using the Nova Act extension in real development workflows to improve speed, reliability, and day-to-day efficiency.
Hertz: Turbocharging booking and quality assurance (QA) workflows
Hertz, a leading global car rental company, is using Nova Act extension to speed up development and testing its rental platforms. “We’re building and testing AI agents for rental workflows in minutes, not weeks,” said Mu Qiao, Senior Director of Software Engineering at Hertz. “At Hertz, we’re driving a digital transformation across our business to strengthen our operations and deliver a better customer experience. With this tool, Hertz developers can create agents that search for cars, complete booking forms, and test error cases in under 30 minutes,” Qiao said. “The live browser view shows every step, so I don’t have to jump between tools. It keeps our workflow simple and efficient.”
On the QA side, the workflow is straightforward. Qiao explains, “I take a test case from a spreadsheet, drop it into the Nova Act extension, and generate a production-ready script. I run it step by step, watch the live browser session, and adjust as needed, which has cut my testing time roughly in half.” Whether in VS Code or Cursor, the extension keeps building, testing, and debugging in one place, with no digging through documents.
Qiao concludes, “For any developer looking to automate workflows like ours, the Nova Act extension is easy to use and can empower you to deliver faster.”
First Orion: Automating form filling and data extraction
First Orion, the pioneer and a leading provider of branded communications solutions, is using the Nova Act extension to streamline customer onboarding and vetting processes. Before adopting the Nova Act extension, First Orion’s CTO Mark Himelfarb reflected on his team’s challenges, “Onboarding customers meant slogging through piles of paperwork, like phone bills for right-of-use verification. It was a pain, and every provider’s format is different. Nova Act extension has cut that onboarding time dramatically.”
Integrated into IDEs like VS Code, the extension lets First Orion’s developers create automation scripts with natural language prompts. For form filling, the chat-to-script feature generates production-ready code in seconds. In builder mode, they step through scripts cell-by-cell, making quick tweaks instead of wrestling with logs or repeated runs.
Tyler Presley, Associate Director of Software Engineering at First Orion, describes the impact on data extraction: “Vetting customers means digging through sites without APIs—each one is different. With the Nova Act extension, we prompt in plain English, like ‘Grab company ownership details from this site,’ and get clean JSON for risk reviews.” Builder mode’s live view helps refine prompts for CAPTCHAs and pop-ups, speeding onboarding and making recurring checks easier.
First Orion CTO Mark Himelfarb sums it up: “This isn’t just a tool. It’s a competitive edge. Tasks that took hours now take minutes, so we keep standards high while we scale.”
Automation anywhere: Search and extraction, dev-style
At Automation Anywhere, a leader in Agentic Process Automation (APA), developers use the Nova Act extension to handle frequent user interface changes and expand into new use cases.
“We edit scripts in VS Code, validate in a live browser, and finish testing in 10 minutes, all in one place,” said Pratyush Garikapati, Director of Product Management at Automation Anywhere. “Writing new scripts was a tedious effort as it needed several tools to validate. Now, we prompt Nova Act to search and extract data, refine in builder mode, and validate without hopping tools in a fraction of the time.”
What’s next
While we're encouraged by early results, we have a lot more work to do. Here are some of the problems we are excited to solve for Nova Act extension:
- Enhanced debugging power: Bulk test scheduling, script topology visualization, variable inspector, and breakpoints for faster, smarter debugging.
- Headless browser & CI/CD: Run agents headlessly and deploy seamlessly with GitHub-integrated CI/CD pipelines for smooth, scalable workflows.
- AWS deployment & more: Deploy to AWS for runtime and observability, with more IDE integrations and agent features on the way.
We believe that building useful AI agents requires both technical progress and careful real-world deployment to understand how these systems perform in practice. This launch represents our commitment to advancing both fronts simultaneously. If you’re excited about frontier research that ships quickly into useful agents, join our team!
Getting started
To get started with the Nova Act extension, visit nova.amazon.com/act and install the extension in your IDE. You can also check out our GitHub repo at github.com/aws/nova-act-extension.
