• by Laurie Sullivan , November 28, 2023

Amazon has announced a digital assistant called Q to help corporate customers search for information, write code, and review business metrics. The announcement was made at its conference re:Invent on Tuesday.

The cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, integrated generative artificial intelligence (GAI) into Q for its customers.

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky during the keynote described it as being able to easily chat, generate content and take actions. It is informed through knowledge of the company's systems, data repositories and operations.

Advertising and marketing are part of the functions. Amazon Q searches through company content, which can include internal style guides, for example, to provide a response appropriate to brand standards.

It can generate tailored social-media prompts to promote the brand’s messages through social-media channels, and then analyze the results of a campaign and summarize it for review.

Q is trained on 17 years of AWS knowledge and will go beyond answering questions, as well as tasks such as understanding the nuances of app workloads and suggest AWS solutions and products for apps that only run for seconds.

AWS customers can configure Q by connecting it to apps that the organization uses, with software like Salesforce, or utilities like Google Gmail or Amazon products.

Q indexes all connected data and content. It learns about the elements of the business including organizational structures, core concepts and product names.

The assistant can take actions on a user’s behalf through a configurable plugin such as automatically creating service tickets in Jira, notifying particular teams in Slack and updating dashboards in ServiceNow.

To prevent mistakes, Q requires users to inspect actions that it is about to take before they run and link to the results for verification.

Q can troubleshoot network connectivity issues as well as analyze network configurations to provide remediation steps. It also ties in with CodeWhisperer, Amazon’s service that generates and interprets code. 

Amazon Q also can generate tests to benchmark software — drawing on knowledge of a customer’s code in Amazon’s CodeCatalyst — and is available in preview in parts of the U.S. such as Virginia, Oregon.