Amazon is about to enter the AI agent race in a big way, giving the tech giant another chance to make progress in the lucrative enterprise software market.
The Seattle-based company is testing new agentic, AI-powered workspace software called Quick Suite, according to internal documents viewed by Business Insider.
Quick Suite empowers “every business user to make better decisions, faster, and act on them swiftly by unifying Al agents for business insights, deep research, and automation into a single experience,” according to one of the documents, marked confidential.
Several companies have been given a private preview of the new technology, and Amazon recently sent out invitations for an internal beta test.
Quick Suite positions AWS to compete more aggressively in AI with agent-driven automation. Agents are the latest frontier in generative AI, designed to take action and independently use tools to complete tasks. Companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Salesforce — along with a host of smaller startups — are racing to be the main providers of agentic tools.
Another crack at SaaS
This is also another chance for Amazon to make a dent in the huge market for enterprise software and applications, known as SaaS. While the company is a pioneer in cloud computing, it’s made less of a mark so far with software that runs on top of this infrastructure.
“With over 40% of business users expected to adopt Al-enhanced work environments soon, AWS is positioned to lead this shift by providing integrated solutions that help organizations — including our own — effectively deploy and scale Al agents in the workplace,” Amazon’s beta test invitation states.
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Business Insider previously reported that Amazon was working on a unified “agentic” AI workspace, internally codenamed Q Business Suite, with “Quick” floated as a potential brand name.
“We are seeing strong growth of Amazon Q Business with customers like Remitly, Nasdaq, and Smartsheet, along with partners like Zoom and Asana, adopting it to provide employees with generative AI assistance to transform how work gets done,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
“Similarly, we are seeing customers like BMW and GoDaddy embrace Amazon QuickSight in order to make data-driven decisions quickly,” the spokesperson added. “We’re building on this strong response with even more innovation to help customers realize the benefits of agentic AI in the workplace.”
Merging existing AWS products
Quick Suite will merge some of AWS’s existing products, such as its data analysis platform QuickSight and its AI chatbot Q Business, while also adding a new product called Quick Flows, according to another of the documents.
Quick Flows provides pre-built workflows that let customers automate tasks through natural language prompts, one of the documents explained.
Quick Suite will include a “deep research agent” to generate reports from company and external data, and will also enable customers to create custom agents for “specific business functions or team needs,” which can then be shared across their organization, one of the documents said.
Beta testers and early feedback
Amazon is inviting a “select group of beta testers” for Quick Suite and has already offered a “private preview” to at least 50 companies, the documents said.
It’s unclear when Amazon plans to officially launch Quick Suite. The tentative launch date has already been delayed from mid-July to September, one of the documents said.
Quick Suite has received mixed feedback from beta users, according to one of the internal documents.
Customers praised its simpler setup and more intuitive design compared to Q Business, as well as its “compelling” deep research feature for both internal and external use. The ability to connect with external tools, such as Atlassian’s Jira, has also been well received.
At the same time, some testers reported frustrations with networking limitations in virtual cloud environments and onerous permission requirements for linking data sources. Early users include BMW, Intuit, and Koch Industries, the document said.
Quick Suite’s launch represents a turning point in AWS’s AI application strategy. Q Business had been intended as the company’s flagship offering for business users, but AWS is now making Quick Suite a priority, as BI previously reported.
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