Amazon's AI assistant now skips routine approvals, asks about risky ones

Amazon Quick, an AI assistant that can act for you, will now stop asking you to approve every small step. A new feature called smart approvals lets a separate review model wave through routine actions. It still sends the risky ones to a person. The feature is on by default.

What changed

AI agents can send email, update records and create tickets for you. Asking a person to approve each of those steps leads to what Amazon calls approval fatigue. People click yes without reading, and oversight gets weaker over time.

Smart approvals tackles that with a second model, called the classifier. It checks each eligible action against what the user actually asked for. Routine actions are approved automatically. Consequential ones are referred to the user.

What still needs a person

• Sending content outside the organization
• Changing permissions
• Deleting content
• Making payments
• Any action that goes beyond what the user asked for

Each automatic approval covers only the exact action that was reviewed. If a review fails or times out, the action goes to the user instead.

What it cannot override

Existing policies come first. Smart approvals only looks at actions where the user's setting is to ask each time. Denied actions stay denied. The feature never grants new access.

Who controls it

Smart approvals is on for all users by default. Administrators decide who can use it through custom permissions. Users can turn it off for their own conversations and scheduled runs in chat options.

AWS CloudTrail, Amazon's activity log, records each review made through smart approvals. It also records each change to a user's smart approvals setting. The feature is available in every AWS Region where Amazon Quick agentic capabilities are supported.

What to do

If your team uses Amazon Quick, expect fewer pop-ups. Check whether the default suits your business. Look at who is allowed to use or change the setting, and know that the activity log exists if you ever need to see what was approved.