What are best practices and/or tools for updating AMIs on a regular basis?

I have a Master-Workers style computation model. And, I launch the workers via an AMI through an Ansible playbook.

The workers' AMI has all the necessary configs needed for doing the computation (which is mostly a pipeline of ML tasks).

However, we keep updating and optimizing our algorithms and ML models almost on a regular basis, which means I have to keep my Worker AMI's up-to-date.

So, is there a tool or a technique which would help me do that?

Also, is it a scalable practise, or is doing the containerized way better?
[By which, I mean launching an EC2 instance and pulling a container and do the computations inside a container].

We are planning to automate this process for our Jenkins EC2 slaves.

Currently we have to manually update the AMI ID every time we build a new AMI, but by taking advantage of the config.xml file where Jenkins store all its configuration, we should be able to automatically update the AMI value in this file and then restart Jenkins to take those changes into effect.

EDIT: see comments below for a better way to make those changes rather the config.xml file

StackExchange DevOps Q#519, answer score: 4