Amazon unveils AI business assistant Q to take on ChatGPT

29 Nov 2023

Image: © photo_gonzo/Stock.adobe.com

AWS said its Amazon Q model offers security and privacy for enterprises, but the AI assistant is entering a competitive market.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has revealed an AI chatbot called Q that is designed for business environments.

The new service was unveiled at the AWS re:Invent conference yesterday (28 November), where the company claimed the model has been built with security and privacy in mind. AWS said customers can use Amazon Q to generate content from the data of their own businesses.

The generative AI model is currently available in a preview form in certain US markets and has two subscription tiers, which are the Business option at $20 a month or the Builder option at $25 a month.

The lower-cost tier gives users a chatbot that aims to solve problems and find insights from company data. It bears similarities to other chatbots in the enterprise market, letting users ask questions to speed up search results or take certain actions to complete tasks faster.

The Builder tier is designed for developers and IT professionals, with the ability to help with debugging and coding. AWS said this tier can also help users explain unfamiliar code and do code optimisations – such as Java upgrades.

On the privacy side, AWS said Amazon Q will never use the content of its customers to train its underlying AI models.

“Amazon Q builds on AWS’s history of taking complex, expensive technologies and making them accessible to customers of all sizes and technical abilities, with a data-first approach and enterprise-grade security and privacy built in from the start,” said AWS data and AI VP Dr Swami Sivasubramanian.

“By bringing generative AI to where our customers work – whether they are building on AWS, working with internal data and systems, or using a range of data and business applications – Amazon Q is a powerful addition to the application layer of our generative AI stack that opens up new possibilities for every organisation.”

Amazon’s new model enters a competitive market, as other companies have already released their own chatbots for enterprises. In March, Microsoft revealed generative AI advancements for its Dynamics 365 Copilot, to help businesses with repetitive tasks.

In August, OpenAI revealed ChatGPT Enterprise, a form of its popular chatbot that is designed to give “enterprise-grade security and privacy” for businesses.

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Leigh Mc Gowran is a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com