Amazon has announced the general availability of Amazon Q, an AI-based assistant for businesses and developers.
Amazon first introduced Q in late November 2023. At the time, the chatbot performed slightly worse than GPT-4. According to AWS Vice President Swami Sivasubramanian, Q is currently the most powerful generative AI assistant with advanced agent capabilities.
The new offering is divided into three areas: Amazon Q Developer helps developers with coding, testing, and maintenance tasks. Amazon Q Business is designed to enable employees to make data-driven decisions based on enterprise data.
According to Amazon, Q Business can seamlessly connect to more than 40 popular enterprise data sources, including Amazon S3, Microsoft 365, and Salesforce. Among other features, administrators can choose to generate responses based only on enterprise data or also using the underlying Large Language Model (LLM).
No-code AI solution similar to OpenAI GPTs
Amazon Q Apps (currently in preview) is the third area. Here, employees can build their own AI applications without any programming knowledge.
They use natural language to describe what kind of application they need. Q Apps then generates an application that does the job. The concept seems similar to OpenAI's and Microsoft's personalized GPT chatbots.
The "apps" are actually prompts created using the LLM, without any actual app programming. Examples cited by Amazon include prompts to summarize meetings, generate interview questions, or provide feedback on a text's grammar.
Amazon claims that early customers are indicating productivity increases of more than 80 percent using Q, but, as is now common in the industry, does not provide specific numbers or examples of how this substantial productivity increase was achieved or measured.
Amazon Q Business is currently available in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions in two subscription plans: Amazon Q Business Lite costs $3 per user per month and provides access to basic functionality. For $20 per user per month, Amazon Q Business Pro subscribers get access to all features, plus Amazon Q Apps and the new generative business intelligence capabilities in Amazon QuickSight.
