AWS re:Invent: Amazon Q Touted As New Business Chatbot

Amazon continues to make announcements at its annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, with the unveiling of an AI chatbot geared towards the business community.

Amazon Web Services announced the launch of its Amazon Q chatbot, which it said is a new type of generative AI-powered assistant that has been “developed with security and privacy in mind.”

It comes as Amazon also used its annual conference to announce an expansion of its collaboration with Nvidia, as well as the arrival of two new families of AI-focused processors.

Amazon Q

The cloud giant said that Amazon Q is a “new type of generative artificial intelligence-(AI) powered assistant that is specifically for work and can be tailored to a customer’s business.”

It said that AWS 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.

Amazon Q provides information and advice to employees to streamline tasks, accelerate decision making and problem solving, and help spark creativity and innovation at work, said Amazon.

And the chatbot can be designed to meet enterprise customers’ stringent requirements, as it can personalise its interactions to each individual user based on an organisation’s existing identities, roles, and permissions.

In addition, Amazon Q never uses business customers’ content to train its underlying models.

Amazon Q offers generative AI-powered assistance to customers building on AWS, working internally, and using AWS applications for business intelligence (BI), contact centres, and supply chain management.

Preview only

Amazon Q is available to customers in preview, with Amazon Q in Connect generally available and Amazon Q in AWS Supply Chain coming soon.

“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, VP 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,” said Dr. Sivasubramanian. “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 organisation,” Dr. Sivasubramanian concluded.

Amazon Q has been trained “on 17 years of AWS knowledge and experience” and 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.

It is understood that Amazon Q pricing will start at $20 per user, per year.

AI commitment

Amazon has been heavily investing in AI of late.

In September, Amazon said it would invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic, a San Francisco-based company that was founded by former staffers from OpenAI.

Amazon also updated its popular assistant Alexa with generative AI capabilities, so users can have more human-like conversations and AI-generated summaries of product reviews for consumers.

That update to Alexa should signal an end to Alexa’s usual robotic tone for the past decade, and allow for more natural sounding conversations.

It should also allow for hands free emergency calling (for a monthly fee).