The views expressed in this post are my own and do not represent the opinions, positions, or endorsements of my current or any former employer.
Amazon Quick Desktop is a native AI assistant for macOS and Windows, launched in April 2026. It connects to your work tools — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Salesforce, Zoom, Jira, and more — and runs persistently in the background, learning the context of your work over time. This guide covers what it does, how to set it up, and how different teams are using it.
What Is Amazon Quick?
Amazon Quick is an AI assistant designed to work across all the tools you already use. Rather than operating within a single app, it connects your local files, calendar, email, and cloud applications into one place and builds a personal knowledge graph — a living model of your role, priorities, relationships, and projects that gets more useful the longer you use it.
The core idea is to reduce the time spent hunting for information across disconnected systems and replace it with a single interface that can answer questions, take actions, and automate workflows on your behalf.
Getting Started
No AWS account or credit card is required to try it.
- Sign up at aws.amazon.com/quick using your email, Google, Apple, Amazon, or GitHub account
- Download the desktop app for macOS or Windows
- Connect your data sources through the onboarding wizard — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Salesforce, Zoom, and others
- Quick begins indexing your files and emails in the background and starts building context
Every new signup includes a free 30-day trial of the Plus plan, which includes full desktop access and expanded agent hours. A free tier is available after the trial.
Core Capabilities
Personal Knowledge Graph
Quick builds a private model of your work — the people you collaborate with, the projects you're involved in, the documents and data you use regularly. This context shapes every answer and action. It's stored locally on your device and is not used to train Amazon's models.
Proactive Intelligence
Rather than waiting for you to ask a question, Quick monitors your connected apps in the background and surfaces what needs attention — an unanswered priority email, a Salesforce deal that hasn't been updated, a document waiting for your feedback. You can ask "What am I missing today?" or "What should I prioritize?" and get answers grounded in your actual work context.
Deep Research
Quick Research is a built-in agent that investigates questions by pulling from your internal documents, the public internet, and third-party datasets simultaneously. It creates a research plan, gathers evidence, and produces a fully cited, exportable report. Reports include clickable citations, version history, and export options for PDF, Word, and custom summary formats.
Document and Dashboard Creation
You can generate deliverables directly within the chat — presentations, spreadsheets, Word documents, PDFs, images, and live dashboards. Dashboards connect to your data sources and update automatically. No need to switch to a separate tool.
Workflow Automation
There are two levels of automation:
- Quick Flows — natural language-based workflows for repeatable tasks like generating weekly reports, routing approvals, or sending automated briefings. No coding required.
- Quick Automate (Professional/Enterprise) — complex, multi-step automations across systems, such as syncing data between Salesforce and a data warehouse or orchestrating cross-team processes.
Team Spaces and Custom Agents
Spaces are shared knowledge environments where teams pool documents, data, and AI agents around a project. You can also build custom chat agents configured with specific knowledge sources, personas, and guardrails — for example, an HR policy assistant, a sales pipeline tracker, or a project health monitor — and share them across your team.
Extensions
Quick extends beyond the desktop app into browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox) and directly into Microsoft Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook) and Slack, so you can access its capabilities without switching windows.
How Teams Are Using It
HR — Onboarding Automation
At the Austin Amazon Quick User Group meetup in January 2026, attendees built a working HR onboarding workflow in under an hour. The setup: upload an employee handbook, leave policy, performance review guidelines, and onboarding checklist into a Space, then create a Quick Flow that accepts employee questions as input, searches the HR documentation, and returns sourced answers automatically. The flow can be shared with the whole HR team.
Operations — Mystery Shopping Review (Ironside Group / HS Brands)
Ironside Group built a solution combining Amazon Quick and Amazon Bedrock to automate survey review for HS Brands Global, a mystery shop provider. The automated system detected inconsistencies, errors, and potential fraud across large volumes of unstructured survey data. Results: review time per batch dropped from days to seconds, annual review capacity scaled from roughly 50,000 shops to millions, and costs were reduced by approximately 85%.
Insurance — Nightly Reconciliation and Compliance (New York Life)
New York Life's Institutional Life division used Quick to replace a manual reporting process that required pulling multiple reports and waiting on analysts. A single conversational agent now handles structured operational data and unstructured documentation together. Their compliance dashboards moved from static reporting to live, self-service analytics, and nightly reconciliation workflows that previously required manual intervention are now automated with Quick Flows.
Manufacturing / Sales — Pipeline Insights (3M)
3M's sales teams used Quick Flows to automate administrative tasks like generating report summaries and updating records, and Quick's agentic capabilities to synthesize information across sales effectiveness, risks, and pricing from multiple platforms.
Pharma Research — Clinical Trial Site Database (Kitsa)
Kitsa built KScout on Amazon Quick — a database of over 300,000 clinical trial sites across 160+ countries — with a team of fewer than five people. Quick powers autonomous site research, medical literature review, and intelligence report generation.
Privacy and Security
- Data stays on your device — conversation history, memory, knowledge graph, and file indexes are stored locally and not uploaded to the cloud
- No model training on your data — AWS does not use your data to train models on any plan, free or paid
- Write operations require approval — Quick will not send an email, update a record, or take an action without your explicit confirmation
- Certifications: HIPAA eligible, FedRAMP authorized, SOC 2 audited
- Open standards: supports Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing integration with third-party agents and tools
Plans
| Plan | Includes | Desktop app |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Chat, Spaces, custom agents, knowledge bases, extensions | No |
| Plus | Full desktop app, expanded agent hours | Yes |
| Professional | Quick Sight (BI), Quick Automate, AWS data connectivity | Yes |
| Enterprise | SSO, advanced governance, region selection, full AWS infrastructure | Yes |
Every signup includes a free 30-day Plus trial with up to 10 team members. No AWS account or credit card required.
Tips for Getting Started
Based on community feedback from the Amazon Quick User Group:
- Start with one specific use case rather than trying to connect everything at once. Pick the workflow that costs your team the most time and build that first.
- Use Spaces to organize knowledge — upload the documents your team references most often and build agents on top of them.
- Quick Flows are more accessible than they look — the natural language builder means non-technical team members can create and maintain automations without developer support.
- The desktop app gets more useful over time — the knowledge graph improves as Quick learns your patterns, so the value compounds the longer you use it.
Get started: aws.amazon.com/quick/desktop
Sources: Amazon Quick features · Amazon Quick FAQs · Amazon Quick customers · Austin Quick User Group meetup · About Amazon: Quick desktop launch. Content was rephrased for compliance with licensing restrictions.
