AWS Expands Q Business gen AI Assistant Features and Integrates with Its Business Intelligence Platform

Amazon Web Services Inc. today used its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to expand the reach of its Q Business generative artificial intelligence assistant with new features and integration with its QuickSight business intelligence tool.

Q Business, introduced by AWS at last year’s re:Invent show, can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and perform tasks based on an organization’s data. It integrates with more than 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 the workflow project management software from Asana Inc. – to provide conversational services. search and retrieve answers that cover all of an organization’s data.

Q Business provides contextually relevant answers that take into account company policies, organization and structure. The wizard creates an index that serves as the canonical – or definitive – source of content and data in an organization. It also manages the index and applies security controls consistent with existing user-level access permissions.

Gen AI for business intelligence

Integration with QuickSight allows users to leverage Q Business features from within the BI platform to get answers that include visual elements such as tables and charts. Q Business and Q in QuickSight now work from the same business data index. In addition to third-party applications, users can now access data contained in documents, emails, data lakes and other unstructured sources within the enterprise and combine it with data from business applications.

For example, Amazon said users can now use Q Business or Q in QuickSight to generate a monthly business review combining information from emails and support tickets with bar charts and other QuickSight visuals showing usage metrics, trends, and outliers.

Customers can now extend and improve the quality of Q Business answers by granting independent software vendors access to data from multiple applications through a single application program interface. The result is more personal experiences with greater context while allowing organizations to maintain full control of their data. AWS can manage a single index on its behalf to eliminate the need for each application to make a copy.

Extensive third-party integration allows video conferencing users, for example, to use AI Companion from Zoom Communications Inc. to transcribe and summarize the meeting while Q index retrieves relevant documents from places such as e- emails Google Docs, Slack or Microsoft Outlook. Documents are only visible to users who already have access to them.

More than 50 automated actions

Q users can now access a library of more than 50 actions spanning Amazon and third-party apps for tasks like processing invoices, managing customer support tickets, and onboarding new employees.

Another new feature planned for next year will use generative AI to discover and automate complex workflows without programming. This means a business user can choose to describe a workflow in natural language, upload a document detailing a process, or use a browser plug-in to capture on-screen interactions. Q Business uses a series of agents to create, modify and manage workflow. Workflows can be configured to run at defined intervals or triggered by specific requests.

QuickSight integration, cross-app index, and new actions are generally available today. The ability to access QuickSight data from Q Business is in preview.

Photo: AWS