At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced Amazon Q, a new type of generative artificial intelligence-(AI) powered assistant that is specifically for work and can be tailored to a customer’s business. Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions—all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems.
Providing information and advice to employees to streamline tasks, Amazon Q can accelerate decision making and problem solving, and help spark creativity and innovation at work. Designed to meet enterprise customers’ stringent requirements, Amazon Q can personalise its interactions to each individual user based on an organisation’s existing identities, roles, and permissions. Additionally, Amazon Q never uses business customers’ content to train its underlying models.
“Generative AI has the potential to spur a technological shift that will reshape how people do everything from searching for information and exploring new ideas to writing and building applications,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and Artificial Intelligence. “AWS is helping customers harness generative AI with solutions at all three layers of the stack, including purpose-built infrastructure, tools, and applications. 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.
Generative AI chat applications have captured the public’s imagination and helped people understand what is possible, but there are still barriers that prevent people from using these solutions at work. Specifically, these chat applications do not know an organisation’s business, data, customers, operations, or employees—the work they do, who they interact with, what information they use, and what they can access.
Trained on 17 years of AWS knowledge and experience, Amazon Q transforms the way developers and IT professionals build, deploy, and operate applications and workloads on AWS. Customers can access Amazon Q through a conversational interface from the AWS Management Console, documentation pages, their IDE, and over Slack or other third-party chat apps.
Amazon Q is an expert on patterns in the AWS Well-Architected Framework, best practices, documentation, and solution implementations, making it easier for customers to explore new services and capabilities, get started faster, learn unfamiliar technologies, architect solutions, troubleshoot, upgrade applications, and more.
Amazon Q is an expert on a customer’s business
Organisations are sitting on vast amounts of information spread across multiple documents, systems, and applications. From finance and human resources to marketing and sales, employees across every organisation collectively spend hours every week searching internal sources for information, piecing together analyses, writing reports, building presentations, or adapting content for different customers or audiences. Generative AI can help solve these challenges, but the general-purpose solutions available today are not connected to internal resources and do not understand a company’s existing identities, roles, and permissions to determine which resources an employee should have access to for their work.
Above all, Amazon Q provides answers and insights that are accurate and faithful to the source material and knowledge a customer provides it, and customers can use additional administrative controls to block entire topics and filter both questions and finalised answers using keywords. Administrators can also limit certain responses to specific employees or data sources.
Amazon Q provides generative AI-powered assistance across Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Connect, and AWS Supply Chain
While many use cases and industries will benefit from the transformative potential of generative AI, the solutions available today are often generic and do not have the specific context needed to carry out domain-specific tasks.
Amazon Q is available to customers in preview, with Amazon Q in Connect generally available and Amazon Q in AWS Supply Chain coming soon. To learn more about Amazon Q, visit aws.amazon.com/q.
