New capabilities provide better insights across Amazon Q Business and Amazon Q in QuickSight, enhance cross-app generative AI experiences, provide more than 50 actions for popular business applications, and make it easy to automate complex workflows, enabling employees to get more done, faster
At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced new capabilities and continued momentum for Amazon Q Business, the most capable generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant for finding information, gaining insight, and taking action at work. With today’s announcements, Amazon Q Business continues to innovate with new features and capabilities that help employees get tedious, time-consuming work done faster.
- Amazon Q Business, Amazon Q in QuickSight, and generative AI-powered experiences in third-party applications, such as Asana and Zoom, can now work from the same canonical index of enterprise data. This empowers employees to get better insights across all of their enterprise information and benefit from more personalized generative AI-powered experiences in third-party applications.
- With more than 50 new actions, like creating a task in Asana or sending a private message in Teams, across some of today’s most popular third-party applications and a new capability that uses agents to execute complex workflows, Amazon Q Business will help employees automate both simple and complex tasks across applications.
- Asana, GE HealthCare, Kepler, and Zoom are among the customers and partners taking advantage of these new capabilities to transform work.
“Amazon Q Business represents a fundamental shift in how employees work with their data and applications,” said Dilip Kumar, vice president of Amazon Q Business, AWS. “With today’s announcements, we are doubling down on some of the features that Amazon Q Business does best, like helping employees find information and work more efficiently with their preferred tools, while also providing a foundation that will make other generative AI experiences smarter. We are also inventing new ways of working, estimating that with our new automation capability, anyone can create these complex process automations in minutes versus the weeks or months it might have taken. This is only the beginning, and we cannot wait to see what our customers can accomplish with these new capabilities.”
Employees at companies of all sizes and across industries face repetitive, time-consuming work, like sifting through data sources to find the information they need or making simple updates across multiple applications, that prevents them from focusing on bigger priorities. That is why AWS created Amazon Q Business, which is built from the ground up with security and privacy in mind, using a company’s existing identities, roles, and access permissions to personalize interactions with each user. Customers across industries and of all sizes are using Amazon Q Business—manufacturing companies are streamlining maintenance, HR teams are helping employees more easily navigate their benefit programs, and marketing teams are creating content in a fraction of the time. Amazon Q Business is also helping employees across Amazon work more efficiently, including generating more than 100,000 account summaries for the AWS Sales team, and reducing the time developers spend churning on technical investigations by more than 450,000 hours.
Since becoming generally available, AWS has continued to innovate to make Amazon Q Business even more useful to employees, adding support for more data types, enabling customers to embed Amazon Q Business in applications and websites, and launching the general availability of Amazon Q Apps, which empowers employees to create generative AI-powered apps with a prompt to automate repetitive tasks. With today’s announcements, AWS is further expanding the ways employees can use Amazon Q Business to get work done and helping Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) enhance their own generative AI experiences to provide better experiences to their end users.
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Securely unifying corporate data for a seamless generative AI experience across applications
The power of Amazon Q is that it unites data sources across a company to learn everything about what makes that company unique. This allows Amazon Q to provide contextually relevant answers to employees by factoring in details like a company’s core concepts, organization, and structure. To accomplish this, customers connect Amazon Q to more than 40 enterprise data sources, like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Google Drive, and SharePoint, along with wikis and internal knowledge bases. Amazon Q then creates an index to serve as a canonical source of content and data across an organization, keeping the index up-to-date and secure, while maintaining existing user-level permissions, so data access is controlled and compliant.
The index today is a valuable part of Amazon Q, and AWS is now expanding the type of data that can be indexed and how it is used to power more tailored experiences.
- Unifying insights across Q Business and Q in QuickSight: Lots of critical business data is stored in databases, data warehouses, and data lakes. To access this data, employees use powerful business intelligence (BI) tools like Amazon QuickSight. Since decisions are rarely made with one kind of data alone, employees could be much more efficient if they could access this information along with unstructured data contained in documents, wikis, emails, and more, all in one place. Amazon Q Business and Amazon Q in QuickSight can now provide insight and analysis across all of these sources from either tool, so employees can streamline their workflows and accelerate decision making. Now employees working with Amazon Q, regardless of whether it is through a standalone app, embedded in a website, or through an app created with Amazon Q Apps, can get answers that include rich visuals, charts, and graphs from Amazon QuickSight. For example, an employee can now use Amazon Q to generate a monthly business review update that combines information from emails and Jira tickets with bar charts and other rich visuals from QuickSight showing usage metrics, trends, and outliers, saving hours of time. And, a user viewing a dashboard in QuickSight can use Amazon Q in QuickSight to augment their data analysis with content from emails, reports, wikis, and other unstructured data sources connected to Amazon Q.
Kepler, a global marketing agency that helps customers turn insights into action, is using Amazon Q in QuickSight to allow its data analysts and client teams to get quick answers to questions about their campaigns. Kepler’s users can now ask about key campaign metrics using natural language and augment their dashboards with contextual information from documents stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Google Drive. Kepler anticipates its teams will achieve a 10X productivity increase through their use of Amazon Q in QuickSight.
- ISVs can now integrate with the Amazon Q index: Customers who want to make the most of their Amazon Q index can now grant ISVs access to enhance their generative AI-powered experiences with data from multiple applications using a single application programming interface (API) to access the same index used by Amazon Q. Now employees can benefit from more powerful, personalized experiences that bring in more context from the other applications across their organization. With fine-grained permissions, customers remain fully in control of their data at all times and can grant specific ISVs access based on their needs. Additionally, customers can reduce their security risks by having AWS manage a single index on their behalf, eliminating the need for each application to make their own copy.
Integrations with the Amazon Q index are available today through popular business applications such as Zoom, Asana, Miro, and PagerDuty, with SmartSheet and others available soon. Asana, a leading enterprise work management platform, integrates Amazon Q Business and Asana AI so customers can surface important insights from third-party applications without leaving Asana. Customers can use Asana AI to take action on work or get project insights—such as blockers, risks, and next steps—by leveraging data from Asana and connected tools like Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and Salesforce. Working in a single, secure work platform, enriched with cross-app data, allows customers to move faster and work smarter towards business goals.
Zoom will also be offering the Amazon Q index as part of its custom AI Companion add-on to allow joint customers to enhance their experience with Zoom’s generative AI assistant. With the custom add-on, during a Zoom Meeting, users can have Zoom AI Companion transcribe and summarize the meeting while the Amazon Q index can surface relevant documents from places like Google Docs, Slack messages, or Outlook emails. Documents are only surfaced to the users who already have access to them, retaining permissions already configured. With the Amazon Q index, Zoom AI Companion will be enhanced to help users be more productive and collaborative throughout their day.
Amazon Q can do more than ever before to help with tasks
Employees waste a significant amount of time just trying to get work done across various different applications and systems. To streamline workflows, Amazon Q allows employees to take actions, like creating an issue in Jira or a ticket in Zendesk, within the enterprise applications they use every day. To help users get more done, Amazon Q users can now access a library of more than 50 actions, allowing them to perform specific tasks across popular third-party productivity applications, such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Smartsheet, and more.
While actions and Amazon Q Apps help employees and teams get more work done, there is still more room for generative AI to drive organization-wide productivity by automating complex, recurring workflows, such as processing invoices, managing customer support tickets, and onboarding new employees. These workflows are often time-consuming and inefficient, requiring a lot of manual work for employees to route things to different teams and make updates across multiple systems. Many companies try to automate these tasks, but developing these automations requires access to complex automation software, which can take weeks or months of time from experts familiar with these tools to set up. Once deployed, even small changes like a minor user interface (UI) modification can break the entire process. To address these challenges, Amazon Q is introducing a new capability that uses generative AI to automate complex workflows, empowering anyone to automate tasks across teams and applications by having a conversation with Amazon Q.
To get started, a user can describe a workflow using natural language, upload a document detailing a process, or use a browser plugin to capture a user performing the steps of the workflow. Then, Amazon Q Business uses a series of advanced agents to create, edit, and maintain the workflow. The agents are powered by multiple models, including Amazon Nova, that allow them to break down workflows into steps, interact with websites, and work across different systems to complete their tasks. For example, a user could create a workflow to download a PDF invoice, enter invoice details into a company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and then, upon successful entry and optional approvals, initiate a payment request through the payment system. Customers can configure their workflows to run autonomously at set intervals or to be triggered by specific requests. Amazon Q uses agents to continuously execute, monitor, and modify the workloads over time, making them much more resilient to change.
GE HealthCare, a global provider of medical technology, pharmaceutical diagnostics, and digital solutions, is collaborating with AWS on generative AI-powered innovations and will explore using the automation capability for clinical and operational workflows, such as helping clinicians quickly get up to speed on their patient’s history, eliminating the time-consuming process of manually navigating across applications to gather data.
Accessing Amazon Q Business data from Amazon Q in QuickSight, the cross-app index, and 50 new actions are generally available today. Accessing Amazon Q in QuickSight data from Amazon Q Business is in preview. The new automation capability is coming in 2025.
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