Amazon has launched a new business-focused chatbot, dubbed Amazon Q, which promises to be a customizable assistant that can answer questions, generate content, and assist employees with a wide range of job functions.
"Really excited to share with customers Amazon Q—a new type of generative AI-powered assistant that is specifically for work and can be tailored to your business," Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy posted on X.
The company lists a few organizations that are already using it: Accenture, Amazon, BMW Group, Gilead, Mission Cloud, Orbit Irrigation, and Wunderkind
Amazon Q seems to work for a range of business types and roles. "If you’re a developer, for example, Amazon Q can assist you in building, deploying, and operating workloads on AWS," Amazon says. "If you’re a contact center agent, it can help you formulate customer responses and respond to queries quickly and accurately."
For employees, it aims to be their all-knowing, helpful boss. Amazon Q "understands the work you do, who you interact with, what information you use, and what you can access, all in the context of your role," Amazon says. However, it appears to be particularly helpful for developers who use AWS, as it "is an expert for customers building, deploying, and operating applications and workloads on AWS," Amazon says.
It features a simple, conversational interface a la ChatGPT. But unlike ChatGPT, when you ask Amazon Q a question, it pulls answers from the "company's information repositories, code bases, and enterprise systems," Amazon says. Businesses can connect their data through databases such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, Confluence, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and more.
The goal is to make customized chatbots accessible to all businesses, rather than having them build it from scratch. It's the same premise as AWS, which made cloud computing widely accessible so companies did not need to start up their own data centers. (Chatbots as a Service? CaaS?)
Amazon says it will keep the company's data secure, and ensure its trade secrets do not appear in answers at other companies. For example, earlier this year Samsung engineers were reprimanded for pasting proprietary code into ChatGPT.
It's the latest in a recent trend toward more customized AI assistants, as opposed to large, general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Bard. OpenAI debuted its own customizable bots earlier this month, dubbed GPTs, that also answer questions using in-house data. OpenAI also offers an Enterprise plan for additional security.
