Amazon unveils corporate chatbot Q

AWS developers announced Amazon Q — an AI-powered chatbot designed specifically to tackle enterprise tasks. 

According to the press release, Q provides employees with information and guidance to optimise workflows and accelerate decision-making, and, “helps foster creativity and innovation”.

“A neural network, designed to meet the strict requirements of corporate clients, can personalise interactions with each individual user based on the organisation’s existing identification data, roles and access rights,” Amazon explained.

Q runs on generative AI that uses AWS services for business analytics, the creation of contact centres and supply-chain management.

The bot’s stack is divided into three levels: infrastructure, tools and applications. The neural network language model has been trained on 17 years of experience and the firm’s database.

Customers will be able to access Q via the AWS Management Console’s conversational interface or the work environment, as well as via Slack or other third‑party communication apps.

In addition, the technology offers developer tools to write functions and transform code.

The Q chatbot is trained on business analytics based on corporate information. Initially the tool supports more than 40 data sources, including Amazon S3, Dropbox, Confluence, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Zendesk.

Q provides responses and analytical information that are accurate and aligned with the source materials, AWS said. Customers can use additional administrative controls to block entire topics and filter input and output data using keywords.

Amazon has also integrated the neural network into other offerings:

• the Amazon QuickSight business-analytics application;
• the cloud-based contact centre Amazon Connect;
• the AWS Supply Chain logistics service.

Among the companies eager to use Q are Accenture, Amazon, BMW Group, Gilead, Mission Cloud, Orbit Irrigation and Wunderkind.

The chatbot is temporarily available only in preview mode, with a mobile app expected to launch in the future.

Q offers two pricing plans: Business for $20 per month and Builder for $25.

In September, Amazon announced strategic investments of up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic.

Earlier AWS founded a $100 million fund to finance its own projects focused on generative artificial intelligence.