Amazon has announced two AI services pitched with typical techbro hyperbole, aimed at changing the way you work.
The first is "a new experience" for Amazon Quick, taking direct aim at Microsoft Copilot and its ilk, only across a wide variety of software. It requires an email address to get started and a new desktop app that, in Amazon's words, "lives on your computer and connects directly to your work."
No AWS account is needed, though it will need authentication with other services to get the most out of it. Amazon notes that native integrations with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoom, and Salesforce are present.
The suite, first unveiled in October 2025, was a web-based experience intended to simplify building agents. It includes proactive alerts and always-on context, and the tool can be used to create apps, such as an HR onboarding portal or a pipeline health monitor for the sales team.
At an event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Amazon Quick VP Jigar Thakkar said, "Every day you lose hours to work that actually does not need you there … Amazon Quick built to give you that time back." He gave an example of setting up a meeting for a project - instead of checking everybody's calendars and sending messages over email, Slack, and multiple other platforms, you just send one prompt via the Quick desktop app: Set up a meeting for project x. It knows who needs to be there, who's busy, who's free, figures out the time, and sends the invite automatically.
It's able to do this because every time you use Quick, it studies what you're doing and stores that context, such as project deadlines, other participants, and so on. When quizzed about the security implications of having a model watching and storing your every move, Thakkar simply pointed to AWS's 20-year-plus history of providing secure cloud services. We're sure there'll be detailed documentation to clarify this hand-wave at some future point.
The second service is a significant overhaul of Amazon Connect, which expands from a single product into four agentic AI components: Connect Decisions for supply chains, Connect Talent for hiring (the company demonstrated a job interview conducted by an AI chatbot, which is a depressing glimpse of the future of work), Connect Health for healthcare, and Connect Customer AI - a rebrand of the original service - focused on customer experience.
Amazon Connect was launched by AWS in 2017 as a cloud-based contact center tech to let businesses establish and manage customer service ops themselves.
"It began as the technology powering Amazon's retail customer service, and we've spent years learning how to run it at scale," the company said.
Each solution comprises a set of AI agents, or "teammates," to take care of business, although Amazon insists it is the user who remains in control.
The market for AI agents running business processes is crowded. Salesforce has staked out its agents everywhere vision, albeit while recovering from a now-patched vulnerability where Agentforce could be tricked into leaking sales data. Similarly, Google offers Gemini Enterprise for workflow automation. Microsoft has gone all in with a new Microsoft 365 tier with features including Agent 365, a dedicated control plane for AI agents.
Amazon will need to work hard to pry customers away from vendors they're already embedded with. ®
Source: The register