Live AWS re:Invent 2024: Keynotes by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and AWS CEO Matt Garman

AWS 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.

The new capabilities offer customers 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 tedious, time-consuming work done faster.

Amazon Q Business 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, from manufacturing companies streamlining maintenance, to HR teams helping employees more easily navigate their benefit programs, and marketing teams 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.

The new Amazon Q Business features and capabilities announced today double down on some of the things Amazon Q Business does best, such as 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.

Amazon Q unites data sources across a company to learn everything about what makes that company unique, allowing it to provide contextually relevant answers to employees by factoring in details such as a company's core concepts, organization, and structure. To accomplish this, customers connect Amazon Q to more than 40 enterprise data sources, including 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, and keeps that index up-to-date and secure. AWS is now expanding the type of data that can be indexed and how it is used to power more tailored experiences.

Unified 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 such as 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.

Independent software vendor integration with the Amazon Q index

Customers can now grant independent software vendors (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. This new 'cross-app index' means employees can benefit from more powerful, personalized experiences, which 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. 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. 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.

Library of more than 50 new actions 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, such as creating an issue in Jira or a ticket in Zendesk, within the enterprise applications they use every day. Now, Amazon Q users can access a library of more than 50 new actions, allowing them to perform specific tasks across popular third-party productivity applications, such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Smartsheet, and more-from creating a task in Asana to sending a private message in Teams.

New automation capability for complex workflows

AWS is also introducing a new capability to Amazon Q that uses generative AI agents to execute more complex workflows, such as processing invoices, managing customer support tickets, and onboarding new employees.

Together, the library of new actions and the new automation capability will empower employees to automate both simple and complex tasks across teams and applications, simply by having a conversation with Amazon Q.

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.

For more details on today's announcements visit the AWS News Blog onthe cross-app index, the50 new actions and the automation capability.