AI WORLD HQ
Have you ever asked an AI tool to check something every morning and wondered whether you had just created a new assistant or simply added a task to an old one? That small question is harder than it sounds, and Amazon's latest post explains how its team sorts it out.
Why the vocabulary matters
Amazon says that as its agents grew from chatbots into doers, the team kept rebuilding the same ideas under different names. To stop that, they settled on four plain questions: When does work start, What is the work, Who does it, and How do they do it? Most of this stays hidden from everyday users. Still, a clear vocabulary helps anyone who builds on top of the system.
The three main pieces
Triggers are what start the work. Amazon describes four kinds:
- Human-initiated: you open a conversation and ask for something.
- Agent-delegated: one agent hands a smaller job to another agent.
- Scheduled: the task runs at set times, like every Monday at 9 a.m.
- Event-driven: something outside the system kicks it off, such as a new email or a Slack mention.
An agent is the "who." Amazon defines it as a persistent, learning actor. Think of it as a worker with a memory. It has standing instructions (its role and rules), a set of capabilities (the tools it can use), and learned context (what it picked up from past work, such as formats you prefer). That last part is why Amazon says the tenth run of a task can go more smoothly than the first, even without anyone changing the instructions.
Capabilities are the "how." Amazon lists three types:
- Tools are single actions, like sending an email or reading a file.
- Skills are bundles of guidance, templates, and examples that describe an approach. The agent loads a skill only when it's relevant, so it doesn't carry every detail all the time.
- Workflows are fixed sequences of steps, such as a budget check, then a manager's sign-off, then a finance review. The order is set, but the agent still makes judgment calls inside each step.
A simple example
Amazon uses a common request: "Monitor my Slack channel and send me a daily digest." According to the company, this is usually not a brand-new agent. It is a trigger, a scheduled instruction, added to an agent you already have. Seeing it that way makes the setup feel less like a mystery and more like adding one new habit to a routine.
Wrap-up
Amazon describes a simple framework: triggers start the work, agents carry it out, and capabilities do the actual steps. The company says this is the first post in a series, so more detail will follow. For now, pick one routine task from your week and sort it into those three parts. You'll be surprised how much clearer your next AI request becomes.