Amazon Web Services has unveiled Amazon Q - a new generative AI-powered assistant that is made "for work" (i.e. for businesses) and can be customized to businesses' needs.
Q provides fast, relevant answers to employees' questions, generates content and takes actions based on the data that is stored in enterprise systems. As a true assistant, Q suggests ways employees could streamline tasks, accelerate decision-making and problem-solving, and fuel creativity.
Amazon keeps privacy and safety on the front burner. With that said, Q never uses businesses' data to train its models. Instead, the assistant works internally and uses AWS apps for business intelligence, contact centers, and supply chain management to maintain the safe use of generative AI.
“Amazon Q builds on AWS’s history of taking complex, expensive technologies and making them accessible to customers of all sizes and technical abilities, with a data-first approach and enterprise-grade security and privacy built-in from the start. By bringing generative AI to where our customers work—whether they are building on AWS, working with internal data and systems, or using a range of data and business applications—Amazon Q is a powerful addition to the application layer of our generative AI stack that opens up new possibilities for every organization,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Data and Artificial Intelligence.
Your own business expert
With over 40 built-in integrations for popular data platforms such as Google Drive, Microsoft 365, Salesforce and Zendesk, Amazon Q can act as your own business expert. How? The assistant synthesizes all the information that it is connected to and enables employees to ask questions about anything they would have to historically search for across different sources. In just seconds, Q will provide relevant content, share answers and link to sources.
Amazon Q can also streamline day-to-day communications, helping employees with tasks like generating a blog post, summarizing documents, drafting emails, and creating meeting agendas, as well as completing tasks in systems like Jira, Salesforce and Zendesk.
Ensuring that the answers are accurate and faithful to the source material, Q lets users leverage additional administrative controls to block entire topics and filter certain questions and finalized answers using keywords Administrators can also limit certain responses to specific employees or data sources. For example, Amazon Q can be set to only respond to security-related questions from the security team or pull answers to people-related questions from a company’s internal directory.
Something for developers too
Trained on 17 years of AWS knowledge and experience, Amazon Q also helps developers and IT professionals build, deploy, and operate applications and workloads on AWS. Users can interact with Amazon Q through a conversational interface from the AWS Management Console, documentation pages, their IDE, and over Slack or other third-party chat apps. Q can answer all sorts of developer-specific questions, like diagnosing a network connectivity issue or tips for solution implementation.
When it comes to implementing new features, a developer can assign Amazon Q a backlog task from their issues list, and Amazon Q then drafts a step-by-step plan, writes the code, and presents a developer with the suggested changes to implement the feature—a developer only needs to review the suggestions, make any necessary adjustments, approve the update, and deploy it.
Amazon Q provides generative AI-powered assistance across Amazon QuickSight (currently in preview) - Amazon's unified business intelligence cloud service, Amazon Connect (generally available) - Amazon's cloud contact center, and AWS Supply Chain (coming soon).
