Amazon Q, introduced during AWS re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas, brings to mind Q, the character from the James Bond franchise. Q’s role involves facilitating Bond’s espionage duties in a smarter and simpler way using modern gadgets. Observing if Amazon Q could play a similar supportive role for business users and IT developers will be intriguing.
Q Supercharges Enterprise Users
Amazon Q is a corporate chatbot designed to automate content search and creation and provide summaries. Essentially, it aids in handling enterprise knowledge bases and repositories while automating tasks such as ticket filing and case creation. This touches a variety of business user personas, including knowledge workers, data and analytics personnel, and call center managers and employees.
It helps developers in debugging and enhancing code for improved performance. By automating alterations to source code, it significantly reduces the workload for developers.
As expected, AWS has integrated Amazon Q into its existing platforms to extend the abovementioned benefits. For instance, it enhances its ML-driven business intelligence platform, QuickSight, to easily author, fine-tune and add visuals to dashboards, automatically generate data stories with natural language, summarize insights, and answer data questions. Similarly, within its contact center solution, Amazon Connect, Amazon Q functions as a recommendation tool, enhancing customer support. It plans to extend this to its supply chain solution, providing improved visibility for inventory managers, supply and demand planners, and other stakeholders.
It controls access permissions throughout this process, considering the worker’s identity and role. Users can link Amazon Q with identity providers supporting SAML 2.0, such as Okta, Azure AD, and Ping Identity, to handle user authentication and authorization. The chatbot leverages the enterprise knowledge to personalize its interactions.
Q Enters the Corporate Chatbot Arena
As AWS made its corporate chatbot debut with Amazon Q, Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT celebrated its one-year milestone on November 30, boasting approximately 1.7 billion users. Microsoft recently brought Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise under its Copilot umbrella of services and made it generally available from December 1.
Google, which introduced its version of enterprise generative AI chatbot, Duet AI, at its annual I/O event in May, recently expanded its integration to encompass its workspace apps such as Gmail, Meet, Drive, Docs, and Slides.
After the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise on August 28, 2023, OpenAI, in its recently held developer conference, DevDay, announced plans to launch the GPT Store, allowing users to create tailored AI models for specific tasks.
Can Q Raise the Bar Higher?
Although a late entrant, Amazon Q seems up for the challenge.
Unlike its peers, Amazon Q is not built on a specific AI model and is powered by Amazon Bedrock, an AWS platform that helps develop generative AI applications using foundational models (FMs) through an API. Amazon Bedrock offers several FMs to choose from, including Amazon Titan (for text summarization and generation), Anthropic (for conversations and questions), Stability AI (for image generation), AI21 Labs (for translation), and the recently included Cohere (for text generation).
It has over 40 built-in connectors to enterprise applications, including Salesforce, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, Gmail, and Slack. Additionally, it offers tight integration with AWS services, including QuickSight and Connect.
Although several of its features are free, it comes with competitive pricing once the preview period ends — $20 per person per month for business users. It costs $25 per person per month with additional features for the developer community. Copilot for Microsoft 365 for business workers costs $30 per person per month, while Duet AI for Google Workspace for business workers costs $30 per person per month.
Presently available in preview mode within AWS regions such as US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon), its availability is anticipated to expand to other regions soon.
Just like how Q in the Bond series surprises us with innovative gadgets and raises the coolness quotient with every new release, it would be interesting to see Amazon Q following suit within the corporate chatbot domain.
By Gaurav Dewan, Research Director, and Dhanusha Ramakrishnan, Lead Analyst, Avasant
