Amazon Web Services (AWS) is rolling out a new generative artificial intelligence (AI) assistant called Amazon Q that is built for businesses to help boost their efficiency.
AWS announced Amazon Q at its recent re:Invent conference and has begun the process of making it available on some of its platforms for business intelligence and contact centers. It will also soon be available to help customers manage their supply chains. The Amazon Q model was trained on Amazon’s datasets and can be trained on business customers’ various data sets depending on the desired use case.
Ben Schreiner, AWS’ head of innovation for small and medium businesses (SMBs), told FOX Business that Amazon Q will help engineers code and find things more quickly and make it easier for businesses to generate and analyze reports. It also looks to ease the onboarding process for AWS for new customers who may not be familiar with the platform or AI tools, as the company aims to "democratize access to this technology" and make it "as easy as possible for them to do that and make a difference for their business."
"The fact it was trained on our best practices and 17 years of experience, you are going to instantaneously have this advisor who is very well versed in all things AWS. You can then train it on all things ‘your company’ – so connected to your knowledge base, your code base, your systems," Schreiner explained. "And now it is a business expert providing you information, so you can make better decisions and then also helping you better, more efficiently run that business."
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Amazon Q also has the built-in ability to connect with 40 other popular business software programs, including Jira, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Zendesk, while additional connectors can be built and others may be integrated into the system as the AI assistant is further developed.
AWS announced that Amazon Q is generally available in Amazon Connect, a cloud-based platform for contact centers. Schreiner explained that many SMBs operate call centers for handling customer contacts and orders, and the integration of Amazon Q is to help the operator better answer questions more quickly by pulling up the knowledge base during the call rather than putting a caller on hold to research it, in addition to understanding the caller’s sentiment and how it changes throughout the call.
"You called in to get a problem resolved, the faster they can resolve that problem the happier customer you’re going to be. So bringing that information forward and having it be dynamic and having it be intelligent based on this AI business expert, we believe is going to be a game changer for customer interaction," Schreiner explained.
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Amazon Q is also available in a preview mode in Amazon Quicksight – an interactive, unified business intelligence platform that offers interactive dashboards, embedded analytics and reports that can be generated in response to users’ queries in a natural language.
"Amazon Q baked into Quicksight, our BI or business intelligence tool is going to allow them to use natural language to ask questions of the data and then get visualizations like a pie chart or a funnel chart or whatever kind of chart they want to represent the information and to do summaries and put reports together in a compressed amount of time," Schreiner explained.
"If I think about my multi-decade career, I spent a lot of time looking for data and a lot of time summarizing, and I think that if I could get that time back – you still need that information, but I would rather be using the information than spending all my time finding and compiling it," he added. "So for our small and medium business audience, I’m super excited about that."
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Amazon Q is expected to be integrated into AWS Supply Chain, a cloud-based app that provides customers insights into their supply chains and how changes in inventory either upstream or downstream could impact their operations through scenario analysis.
