News
Research Report
Mind The Agentic Action Gap: Stop Losing Money With AI Agents
In Brief
- Unified digital coworker & workspace assistant. Much like Claude Cowork, Amazon Quick connects files, apps and workflows on desktop and act as an AI agent assisting with daily work tasks.
- Proactive content creation. Generates presentations, dashboards and documents from user data.
- Broadly Accessible. No AWS account needed — Amazon Quick requires only an email address to sign up and starts at $20 per month.
Taking aim at Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic's Claude Cowork, Amazon Web Services (AWS) today launched Amazon Quick, a desktop AI assistant and digital coworker offering that connects to local files, calendars, email and enterprise applications.
At launch, Quick integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Gmail, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Asana, Jira, Google Workspace, Zoom, Microsoft 365, Airtable, Dropbox and other enterprise services. The assistant indexes documents and builds a personal knowledge graph that Amazon stated helps users and the tool retain context across sessions — a gap the company identified in existing AI tools.
The desktop app runs locally and connects to developer tools such as Kiro CLI and Claude Code. Amazon asserted Quick can automate browser-based workflows, run local Python scripts and paste results into documents in a single request.
Recent AWS Moves
AWS has emerged as a central force in enterprise AI infrastructure, anchored by its deepening relationship with OpenAI. What began as a $38 billion cloud computing deal in November 2025 expanded by March 2026 into a $138 billion commitment, with AWS named primary external cloud provider for Frontier, OpenAI's flagship enterprise agentic AI platform.
That arrangement has drawn legal fire. Microsoft threatened to sue both companies, arguing the AWS-hosted Frontier deal violates an exclusivity clause requiring API-level OpenAI model access to route through Azure. Talks to avoid litigation were ongoing as of March 2026.
AWS's infrastructure dominance carries systemic risk alongside commercial momentum. An October 2025 outage exposed how dependent enterprise AI systems have become on single cloud providers, renewing urgency around multi-cloud strategies — a dynamic that matters given roughly 75% of large-scale AI compute capacity sits with a handful of U.S. hyperscalers.
Capacity expansion continues at pace, with Amazon committing $12 billion to a Louisiana data center campus in February 2026. At re:Invent 2025, AWS introduced Graviton5 CPUs, Trainium3 UltraServers, AI Factories for on-premises deployments and Bedrock AgentCore for governed agentic workloads.
Desktop AI Moves Beyond Chat
Vendors are embedding AI assistants directly into the desktop, moving beyond Q&A tools toward AI agents that take action across the applications where work happens.
Microsoft's Copilot Cowork, built on Claude and WorkIQ, handles cross-application task execution — rescheduling meetings, drafting presentations and coordinating projects across Microsoft 365. Users describe tasks in natural language, and the assistant builds and executes a plan while inheriting enterprise security settings from existing Microsoft 365 configurations.
Anthropic's Claude Cowork takes a desktop-native approach, working with local files and extending capabilities through plugins and connectors to third-party enterprise apps. The pattern across vendors is clear: embed AI into the tools employees already use rather than deploy separate applications, giving the assistant immediate work context.
Amazon Quick has fundamentally changed how we operate — how we make decisions, execute strategies, and respond to opportunities. We're an Institutional Life insurance business with complex, high-volume workflows: nightly reconciliation, premium processing, compliance reporting. Before Quick, getting answers meant pulling many reports, waiting on analysts, and still not having the full picture. Now, a single conversational agent can replace all of that — and anyone on the team can use it.
- David Gregorat
CTO, Institutional Life at New York Life
Quick Feature Breakdown
Amazon said Quick introduces several new capabilities alongside the desktop app:
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Desktop app | Connects to local files, calendar, email and enterprise apps |
| Custom app building (preview) | Build apps, dashboards and web pages via natural language |
| Asset generation | Create presentations, infographics and images from chat |
| Microsoft 365 extensions (preview) | Surface insights and draft content in Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint |
| Shared Spaces | Team knowledge sharing via dashboards, agents and automations |