AWS maps agentic primitives in Amazon Quick, from triggers to workflows

AWS published a taxonomy of agentic primitives in Amazon Quick on November 6, 2026, organizing them into triggers, agents, capabilities, and learned context. The framework breaks agentic work into four questions: when it runs, what it does, who performs it, and how it is carried out. A trigger, in this model, both activates work and carries task instructions, covering the “When” and “What.”

For a request to monitor Slack and send a morning digest, the post says the usual approach is to add a trigger to an existing agent rather than create another agent or workflow. Capabilities describe how an agent acts, ranging from fully agentic to fully deterministic execution—a distinction that reflects how much latitude the agent has.

AWS distinguishes tools from workflows as well. Tools are atomic operations with typed schemas, such as sending email, querying a database, or reading a file. Workflows coordinate actions in a fixed order through declared steps, control flow, branching, and error handling, with decision logic in code. The post says skills can capture, version, and share institutional expertise, while workflows offer auditability, step-wise visibility, and deterministic coordination across multiple services.

The taxonomy follows AWS’s June 2026 announcement of autonomous agents in Amazon Quick, adding a framework for breaking down agent tasks and choosing how to implement them. For teams designing automations, the distinctions clarify when to extend an existing agent, when to use a structured workflow, and how much autonomy a task may require.