AWS launches Amazon Q 'to reimagine the future of work'

PRESS RELEASE

November 28, 2023

AWS Announces Amazon Q to Reimagine the Future of Work

– New type of generative AI-powered assistant, built with security and privacy in mind, empowers employees to get answers to questions, solve problems, generate content, and take actions using the data and expertise found at their company

– Accenture, BMW Group, Gilead, Mission Cloud, Orbit Irrigation, and Wunderkind among the customers and partners excited to use Amazon Q

LAS VEGAS–(BUSINESS WIRE)– At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today 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. 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. Designed to meet enterprise customers’ stringent requirements, Amazon Q can personalize its interactions to each individual user based on an organization’s existing identities, roles, and permissions. Additionally, Amazon Q never uses business customers’ content to train its underlying models. Amazon Q brings generative AI-powered assistance to customers building on AWS, working internally, and using AWS applications for business intelligence (BI), contact centers, and supply chain management to help organizations of all sizes and across industries use generative AI safely. 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.

“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. 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.”

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 organization’s business, data, customers, operations, or employees—the work they do, who they interact with, what information they use, and what they can access. Additionally, these solutions were not initially built with the security and privacy features that organizations need for employees to safely use them in their day-to-day work. This has led to companies adding these features to their assistants after they were built, which does not work as well as incorporating security into the assistant’s fundamental design. That is why AWS created Amazon Q, helping customers unlock the full benefit of generative AI for every employee.

Amazon Q is an expert for customers building, deploying, and operating applications and workloads on AWS

Today, developers and information technology (IT) professionals are expected to keep up with the latest technological developments, design and deliver new features quickly, manage the end-to-end lifecycle of applications and workloads, and balance competing priorities when it comes to building net-new capabilities and maintaining existing offerings. All of this requires significant work for developers and IT professionals that distracts them from their core focus. Whether they are trying to answer a straightforward question, like how a specific feature works, or a nuanced one, like finding the best Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance for a given workload, customers spend a significant portion of their time learning how things work through documentation, public forums, and conversations with colleagues. Once the application is up and running, customers need to dedicate additional time and resources to maintain it. For example, troubleshooting a network connectivity issue may require a customer to work quickly to diagnose the problem, ensure there is proper connectivity between resources, and review network configuration details, sometimes in the absence of additional guidance or support from teammates. In their integrated development environment (IDE), a developer that takes over a project from a colleague may have to spend time studying previously written code to understand its underlying programming logic. Regardless of the project they are working on, they also have to continuously debug, test, and optimize their code, taking time away from building new features. Throughout all of these steps, developers and IT professionals are moving between the AWS Management Console and documentation, the IDE, and chatrooms with colleagues, and there is not a unified source to help answer questions across every step of the process from planning to maintaining applications.

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. Customers can get crisp answers and guidance by asking questions to learn about AWS capabilities (e.g., “Tell me about Agents for Amazon Bedrock?”), research how an AWS service works (e.g., “What are the scaling limits on a DynamoDB table?”), figure out the best way to architect a solution (e.g., “What are the best practices for building event-driven architectures?”), or identify the best service for their use case (e.g., “What are the ways to build a web app on AWS?”). Based on the question, Amazon Q will give succinct answers that include citations and links to its sources, and customers can ask any number of follow up questions to get more details, find the best option for their workload, and receive an outline of the basic steps to get started. Customers can also use Amazon Q to select the best EC2 instance for their workload by asking questions like, “Help me find the right EC2 instance to deploy a video encoding workload for my gaming app with the highest performance,” and Amazon Q will provide a list of instance families with the reasons to use each of them. To troubleshoot an issue like an EC2 or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) configuration error, customers simply press the “Troubleshoot with Amazon Q” button while in the AWS Management Console to have Amazon Q research the error and suggest a fix. Customers can also troubleshoot network issues by asking questions like, “Why can I not connect to my EC2 instance from my laptop?” and Amazon Q will analyze a customer’s end-to-end network configuration and provide a diagnosis (e.g., “This instance appears to be in a private subnet, so public accessibility may need to be established.”)…

The full release is here.