At re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced Amazon Q, a new generative artificial intelligence powered assistant designed to transform how employees work. Amazon Q aims to make generative AI, which has produced some impressive demonstration chatbots – more accessible and tailored for real-world business use.
Amazon Q brings natural language conversations directly to where customers are already working. As an AI assistant, Q understands AWS infrastructure and can answer questions across the management console, IDEs and documentation. But uniquely, Q also understands each customer’s own code, data and systems thanks to over 40 connectors that allow clients to onboard their internal repositories.
This level of business context awareness is key. While generative AI chatbots have shown future possibilities, existing solutions lack the insight into a company’s operations, customers and employee permissions needed for safe, effective use at work. Amazon Q addresses this by personalising responses for each user based on their identity and access controls.
Q also makes its debut across AWS applications and services. In Amazon QuickSight, Q introduces new generative capabilities for data storytelling and executive summaries. Contact centre agents can get Q’s help in Amazon Connect for quicker, more accurate customer resolutions. And an integration for AWS Supply Chain is on the way to assist with supply chain planning queries.
Customers are already impressed with Q’s potential. Partner Accenture, which works closely with AWS, plans to equip 50,000+ developers with Q over the next two years. The company recently saw a 30 percent boost when experimenting with CodeWhisperer and expects Q will drive even more gains.
Early AWS adopters are also enthusiastic. Amazon itself used Q’s code transformation tool to streamline upgrading 1,000 production Java apps from version 8 to 17 – a task that normally takes months but was completed in just two days.
With Q, AWS aims to unlock the transformational power of generative AI safely for organisations. By understanding each company’s unique context and knowledge base, Q promises to streamline common workplace tasks, spark creativity and help employees work smarter across their systems and applications. Only time will tell just how profoundly this new AI assistant may reshape how business gets done.
