AWS CEO Adam Selipsky on Tuesday premiered the star of the cloud giant’s ongoing re:Invent 2023 conference: Amazon Q, the company’s answer to Microsoft’s GPT-driven Copilot generative AI assistant.
Selipsky’s announcement of Q was reminiscent of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote at Ignite and Build, where he announced several integrations and flavors of Copilot across a wide range of products.
“Amazon Q can handle all of the basic productivity tasks that Copilot can, but can also be used to work across a wide range of apps across the stack, which should appeal to IT managers who want to limit the number of assistants that need to be monitored,” said Keith Kirkpatrick, research director of enterprise applications at The Futurum Group.
Amazon Q, which builds on AWS’ data and development expertise of 17 years, can be used by enterprises across a variety of functions including developing applications, transforming code, generating business intelligence, acting as a generative AI assistant for business applications, and helping customer service agents via the Amazon Connect offering.
Amazon Q as a generative AI assistant for business applications
Amazon Q, as a generative AI assistant for business applications, can be used to have conversations, solve problems, generate content, gain insights, and take action by connecting to your company’s information repositories, code, data, and enterprise systems, the company said. It is accessed via a browser and web interface — in other words, it’s a web-based application.
In order to use Q as an assistant for business applications, enterprises need to configure the generative AI assistant by connecting it to existing data sources, which can include AWS’ S3 storage service as well as applications from vendors including Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, and Slack. Support for over 40 applications and services are supported out of the box.
The recipe seems very similar to Palo Alto-based startup Glean’s assistant, dubbed Glean Chat.
“Once connected, Amazon Q starts indexing all of your data and content, learning everything there is to know about your business. This includes understanding the core concepts, product names, organization structure, all the details that make your business unique. As well as indexing the data from these sources,” said Matt Wood, vice president of AI at AWS.
“Q also uses generative AI to understand and capture the semantic information which makes your business unique. This additional semantic information is captured as vector embeddings, allowing Q to provide highly relevant results which are tailored to your specific company and industry,” Wood added.
Wood said that when an employee attempts a query inside Q, the generative AI assistant creates a set of input prompts at the back end, using all the business infomration available to find relevant data and form a response, while displaying sources.
In cases…
2023-12-01 10:41:02
Post from www.computerworld.com rnrn