Amazon Announces Q, an AI Chatbot for the Enterprise

Caught flatfooted by Microsoft’s rapid embrace of AI this year, Amazon has finally responded with an AI chatbot of its own. It’s called Q—like the omniscient character in Star Trek: The Next Generation—and Amazon built it on top of its AWS service, though Amazon claims it’s a play on the term “question.”

“Generative AI has the potential to spur a technological shift that will reshape how people do everything from searching for information and exploring new ideas to writing and building applications,” Amazon vice president Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian says. “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. 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 organization.”

Unlike the chatbots popularized by OpenAI, Microsoft, and, to a lesser degree, Google, Q is aimed solely at the enterprise, and not at consumers. So it competes with ChatGPT Enterprise, Copilot for Microsoft 365, and Duet AI, and will leverage Amazon’s dominance in cloud computing infrastructure while offering security and privacy functionality that the firm says the competition lacks. It will initially work with data stored on Amazon’s servers plus Slack and Gmail.

“With Amazon Q, employees can ask questions and get answers from knowledge spread across disparate content repositories, summarize lengthy reports, write articles, take actions, and much more—all within their company’s connected content repositories,” a post to the AWS website explains. “Amazon Q offers over 40 built-in connectors to popular enterprise systems. It generates responses only from the content that each user is permitted to access with enterprise-grade access control. It also provides references and citations, so users can trace which documents were used to provide a response.”

Q isn’t built on a single AI model but instead utilizes Amazon’s Bedrock developer platform, which can access multiple Large Language Models (LLMs). It can be accessed using a “conversational interface” from the AWS Management Console, a developer IDE, and Slack and other third-party chat apps. Pricing starts at $20 per user per month, which is about $10 less per user per month than the similar Microsoft and Google offerings.

Amazon Q is available now in preview in the U.S. You can learn more from the Amazon Q website.