Amazon Q Business: Revolutionizing Enterprise AI with Enhanced Integrations and Workflow Automation

Q Business: Rethinking workflow automation and data intelligence - SiliconANGLE

Data is revolutionizing the business landscape, with companies extracting new competitive areas by getting smarter with their insights-generation process. Recognizing this shift, Amazon Inc. has introduced Q Business, which is designed to empower non-technical users while complementing developers, transforming data accessibility and productivity. "Imagine a business intelligence person ... being able to generate reports about their business for the last six months and extract all the information from all the meetings they've had, all the information sitting in their documents in Outlook and all of that, bringing it all together," said Mukesh Karki (pictured), general manager and director of Amazon Q Business at AWS. "That's just compelling, and it was a big announcement." Karki spoke with theCUBE Research's John Furrier for theCUBE's "Cloud AWS re:Invent Coverage," during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed AWS' continued innovation with Q Business, addressing emerging customer needs while democratizing access to advanced analytics and AI. (* Disclosure below.) AWS introduced several enhancements to Q Business, with a focus on integrating business intelligence and workflow automation. Highlights included the capability to consolidate data from diverse sources -- such as Outlook, Microsoft Exchange or Confluence -- and derive actionable insights through natural language queries. For instance, users can now generate reports, create support tickets or extract insights from meetings and documents, directly within the platform's intuitive interface, according to Karki. "What's happening behind the scenes is we are using these models to go through all these structured data that exists in your data lakes, data stores and all of these places, and these models are trained to give insights to the users," he said. "It's not just the data scientists, data engineers, but other folks as well." Moreover, AWS emphasized the integration with Amazon QuickSight, enabling data storytelling through interactive dashboards. The synergy between these tools underscores AWS' vision: simplifying data utilization for all users, according to Karki. "Through the Q Business interface, they can basically say well get that insight from Q and QuickSight and combine all of this together," he said. "It's much more than just a chatbot at this point in time."

AWS expands Q Business gen AI assistant features and integrates with its business intelligence platform - SiliconANGLE

AWS expands Q Business gen AI assistant features and integrates with its business intelligence platform Amazon Web Services Inc. is using its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas today to broaden the scope of its Q Business generative artificial intelligence assistant with new features and integration with its QuickSight business intelligence tool. Q Business, which AWS introduced at last year's re:Invent, can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content and perform tasks based on an organization's data. It integrates with over 40 enterprise data sources - such as Microsoft Corp.'s Microsoft 365, Amazon's S3 Storage, Google LLC's Drive, Salesforce Inc.'s customer relationship management suite and Asana Inc.'s workflow project management product - to provide conversational search and answer retrieval that spans all of an organization's data. Q Business delivers contextually relevant answers that factor in company policies, organization and structure. The assistant creates an index that serves as a canonical - or definitive- source of content and data across an organization. It also maintains the index and applies security controls that comply with existing user-level access permissions. Integration with QuickSight allows users to tap Q Business capabilities from within the BI platform to get answers that include visuals like charts and graphs. Q Business and Q in QuickSight now work from the same index of enterprise data. In addition to third-party applications, users can now access data contained in documents, emails, data lakes and other unstructured sources within the business and combine it with data from business applications. For example, Amazon said people can now use Q Business or Q in QuickSight to generate a monthly business review that combines information from emails and help desk tickets with bar charts and other visuals from QuickSight showing usage metrics, trends and outliers. Customers can now expand and enhance quality of Q Business responses by granting independent software vendors access to data from multiple applications via a single application program interface. The result is more personal experiences with greater context while enabling organizations to retain full control of their data. AWS can manage a single index on their behalf to eliminate the need for each application to make a copy. Extended third-party integration allows users on a videoconference, for example, to use Zoom Communications Inc.'s AI Companion to transcribe and summarize the meeting while Q index retrieves relevant documents from places like Google Docs, Slack or Microsoft Outlook emails. Documents are only visible to users who already have access to them. Q users can now access a library more than 50 actions covering Amazon and third-party applications for tasks like processing invoices, managing customer support tickets and onboarding new employees. Another new capability due next year will use generative AI to discover and automate complex workflows without programming. That means a business user can choose to describe a workflow using natural language, upload a document detailing a process or use a browser plugin to capture on-screen interactions. Q Business uses a series of agents to create, edit and maintain the workflow. Workflows can be configured to run at set intervals or triggered by specific requests. QuickSight integration, the cross-application index and new actions are generally available today. The ability to access QuickSight data from Q Business is in preview.

Amazon Q unlocks new generative AI capabilities for business users - SiliconANGLE

Amazon Q unlocks new generative AI capabilities for business users Amazon Web Services Inc. continues to expand the reach of its generative artificial intelligence assistant Amazon Q by bringing it to more applications for business users. At the company's re:Invent 2024 conference today, AWS announced a new capability for Amazon Q in QuickSight that will help business users perform lengthy scenario analysis to find answers to complex problems quickly. Amazon also announced that Q Developer is now available in SageMaker Canvas, a tool for building large-scale machine learning and artificial intelligence models, using a visual interface without needing code or expertise. AWS launched Amazon Q earlier this year for developers and business users to act as a generative AI assistant that can help with coding and business tasks. It consists of multiple formats including Amazon Q Developer, which works alongside developers and IT professionals where it acts as a coding assistant within code editors. Business users get access to Amazon Q Business, which can securely use an organization's enterprise data, helping employees stay prepared and productive. QuickSight is a cloud-based business intelligence tool that allows business users to analyze data, create visualizations and share insights. It supports various data sources, including databases, data warehouses, software-as-a-service applications and files. Users can create dashboards, reports and charts to visualize data. "The convergence of business intelligence and generative AI with Amazon Q will continue to unlock new possibilities for our customers, but as these models became more and more powerful, we know we could do more to accelerate data-driven decision-making," said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of AI and data at AWS. "Today many business users are faced with questions that cannot be answered by a simple Q&A on their data." Analysis tasks often lead to complex approaches to develop charts or visualizations from data sources, which can be a laborious amount of knowledge work. This new Amazon Q capability can take in complex questions and analyze multiple data sources simultaneously to suggest an analytical approach to address a business goal. For example, a business user could ask the AI assistant, "How can I help our store perform as well as the flagship store in Phoenix, AZ?" Using an agent-based approach, Amazon Q would then automatically analyze the data, present results complete with visualizations in QuickSight and suggest actions. It would do so across the software's canvas, which would enable the user to make adjustments to the plan, explore different approaches and adapt their ideas. According to Sivasubramanian, using Q's new capabilities in QuickSight business users can perform complex analysis ten times faster than using spreadsheets. Each step of the way, Amazon Q remains on hand with a conversational interface allowing the user to ask more questions and provide answers about the analysis. If the answer changes the projections or visualizations, the assistant can update the canvas and act as a collaborator alongside the business user to help them get where they're going faster. Amazon also announced that Q Developer is coming to SageMaker Canvas, a no-code machine learning model-building platform that will make collaborating on building, customizing and deploying new models easier for less technical users. Through bringing Q Developer to SageMaker Canvas business users with expert knowledge in their particular industry, can quickly build accurate, production-quality machine learning models using natural language interactions. Q Developer guides users through a conversational interface by breaking down business problems and data using step-by-step guidance for building custom machine-learning models using SageMaker Canvas. It will also clean their data to fix anomalies, build and evaluate their models to recommend the best one to fit their goals and guide them through a workflow. For example, a user could ask Q, "I want to build a model that will help me predict the number of passengers that will take rideshares across certain days given historical patterns of past usage, weather data, pricing, holidays and events." Q Developer would then take that plan and analyze the given data to build multiple models to provide an approach.

Amazon's Q Business AI agent gets smarter | TechCrunch

A year ago, AWS announced Q, its AI assistant platform for business users and developers. Q Developer is getting a wide range of updates today and so is Q Business. The focus for Q Business is on new integrations that can help businesses bring in more data from third-party tools, the ability for third-party platforms to integrate Q into their own services, and new actions that will allow Q to perform tasks on behalf of its users across third-party applications like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Smartsheet, among others. Previously, Q was already able to pull in data from about 40 enterprise tools ranging from data stores like Amazon's own S3 to services like Google Drive, SharePoint, Zendesk, Box and Jira. Q then creates a canonical index of all of this data (keeping access permissions and other settings intact). The idea now is to expand the types of data the service can index and then use that to provide ever more personalized results. This index, after all, is at the core of Q's capabilities. Now, business will be able to take the data they have stored in databases, data warehouses, and data lakes and combine it with the rest of their business data, be that documents, wikis or emails -- and they can now do so in QuickSight, AWS' business intelligence service. Amazon Q in QuickSight, the company says, will allow employees to query this data and quickly generate charts and graphs with the help of Q (or augment existing charts with content from a wider variety of sources). These new features are now in preview. The feature that is maybe the most interesting from a business perspective is that third-party services like Zoom, Asana, Miro, PagerDuty, Smartsheet and others will now be able to integrate Amazon Q Business into their own services. These services will get access to an API that will allow their generative AI-powered experiences to access the same index that is also used by Q. Asana, for example, is integrating Q Business and Asana AI to help its customers find information from other third-party applications (that are indexed by Q) without having to leave Asana. And from there, they can then also kick off Q workflows and take actions in these third-party tools as well. Similary, Zoom will use the Q index to enhance its own AI assistant so that, for example, the Zoom AI Companion can transcribe and summarize a meeting while Q looks for relevant documents, email or wiki entries related to the call. AWS stresses that all of these features will only surface information that the users have permission to access. In this context, it is worth noting that others, including Atlassian's Rovo, also heavily focus on third-party data integrations (Rovo offers about 80 or so connectors at this point). For many of them, including Atlassian, the idea is to keep users on their own platforms, though, not to have third-party services integrate their assistants and indexes. That's an interesting play on AWS' part. The dream of productivity nerds has long been to automate more of the repetitive but hard to automate processes that are part and parcel of running a business. With this update, Q Business will now feature a library of more than 50 actions that Q can perform for them, but more importantly, AWS is going beyond the workflow automation tools it already offered with Q. The service now uses generative AI so that users can simply describe a workflow using natural language or upload a document that describes a given process. They can also use a browser plugin to let Q capture how they perform an action step-by-step. Q Business then creates the agents that can perform and maintain this workflow. These workflows can run at specific intervals or triggered by specific actions. The market for workflow automation is getting crowded with startups and incumbents like UIPath and Microsoft's Power Automate. But it seems like the advent of generative AI may finally allow some of these products to live up to the promises of what was once called 'robotic process automation.' Those systems were often too brittle in real-world usage, but generative AI now allows for a bit more flexibility in how these tools interact with third-party platforms.