Amazon claims its new workplace AI software can curb app sprawl

These days, a whole slew of companies want to supply AI agents that purport to help you do your job better.

Add Amazon Web Services (AWS) to that growing list. The tech giant is rolling out a new platform called Amazon Quick Suite that aims to provide a universal chat interface for surfacing and assembling workplace information, as well as creating agents to perform certain routine tasks.

“The idea is that we want people to have this unified interface from which you can answer questions, do research, take actions, all of that,” Jose Kunnackal John, director of Amazon Quick Suite, said.

The move positions AWS to compete with the likes of Microsoft and Google, which have their own agentic tools for enterprise. These companies and others have heralded agents as the next chapter of generative AI adoption in the workplace.

What sets Amazon apart, Kunnackal John said, is that AWS customers wanted an AI system that can operate across the many apps and platforms that workers use in a typical day.

“There is this plethora of tools in the enterprise, and every tool has AI,” he said. “Google’s got its own suite. Microsoft’s got its own suite. You can pick every provider; they have their own suite of tools. The idea is, can you bring all of the context that you have, all of the data that you have, into one place? And often that’s not the case, and with Quick Suite, we are trying to make that the case.”

Agents in action: At Amazon’s offices in Manhattan, the company offered a demo of Quick Suite focused on different jobs—IT, marketing, sales, journalism (the last presumably more of a play to the audience in the room than a big potential business line).

You can ask questions or generate longer research reports drawn from a variety of different information sources—internal reference docs, data warehouses, and the open web. You can create actions—or Quick Flows—that will automatically do things like update certain tickets or help onboard new workers into systems. It can send messages or recap emails.

For the media pros in the room, Kunnackal John suggested providing the system with past comments from an editor to train it to anticipate future critiques on story drafts. Or maybe to generate a research overview on existing news stories about a given topic.

Where it fits: AWS previously rolled out a package of developer tools for building AI agents this summer. But as a workplace software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Quick Suite builds more on Amazon Q, Amazon’s enterprise AI assistant, which has faced accuracy issues in the past, according to a Business Insider report last week that cited internal review documents.

Quick Suite has been beta tested with hundreds of customers across healthcare, manufacturing, and travel, including 3M, Vertiv, and Jabil, as well as tens of thousands of Amazon employees, according to the announcement.

“People are creating chat agents and flows that essentially take away that heavy lifting that they’ve had to do, and that eases their work,” Kunnackal John said. “It’s not that I’m massively rolling out an AI project. AI is not something scary. This makes it easy for them to use it and to adopt it in their own workflows, whatever that is.”