Amazon Web Services added a feature called smart approvals to Amazon Quick on Oct. 28. It uses a separate AI model, which AWS calls the classifier, to decide whether an action an agent wants to take can go ahead without asking the user first.
Amazon Quick is AWS’s AI assistant for office work. It connects to business apps, answers questions about company data and, increasingly, takes actions such as sending email, updating records and creating tickets.
AWS says the new layer is meant to fix “approval fatigue.” In its announcement, the company said that asking a person to approve every step “leads to approval fatigue and weaker oversight over time,” because people start clicking yes without reading.
How the classifier decides
The classifier checks each eligible action against what the user actually asked for, AWS says. Routine actions that fit the request get approved automatically. Consequential ones go back to the user.
AWS lists the kinds of actions it treats as higher impact. They include sending content outside the organization, changing permissions, deleting content, making payments and anything that goes beyond what the user asked for.
Each automatic approval covers only the exact action that was reviewed, the company says. If a review fails or times out, the action goes to the user instead of going ahead.
The feature sits under a user’s existing settings. Smart approvals only reviews actions that are set to “ask” each time, denied actions stay denied, and AWS says the feature “never grants new access.”
It’s switched on for all users by default. Administrators can control who can use it with custom permissions, and users can turn it off for their own conversations and scheduled runs in chat options.
AWS CloudTrail, the company’s audit logging service, records each review the classifier makes and each change a user makes to the setting. That gives administrators a record of what was approved without a human.
Where Quick is heading
The feature follows a push to make Quick’s agents work with less supervision. In June, AWS added autonomous agents to Quick that users can describe in plain language and leave running, with autonomy levels the user sets, from approving each step to letting the agent work toward a broad goal. AWS gave examples such as following up on stalled deals and processing purchase orders.
AWS first introduced the product as Amazon Quick Suite in 2025, describing it in a launch post as an “agentic teammate” for answering questions and taking action.
Agents that run in the background on recurring tasks are the ones most likely to generate a steady stream of approval requests. Smart approvals is AWS’s answer to that, and it relies on one model checking another.
AWS hasn’t published accuracy figures for the classifier, such as how often it approves an action a user would have rejected. Smart approvals is available in every AWS Region where Quick’s agent features are supported, the company says.
Source: AWS What's New, AWS, “Quick now supports smart approvals for agentic actions”
Additional sources: AWS What's New, AWS, “Amazon Quick announces autonomous agents, multi-dataset analytics, and redesigned activity feed”; AWS News Blog, AWS, “Announcing Amazon Quick Suite: your agentic teammate for answering questions and taking action”
