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A year ago, AWS announced Q, an AI assistant platform for business users and developers. Q Developer is getting a wide range of updates today and so is Q Business. Q Business’s focus is on new integrations that can help businesses bring in more data from third-party tools, the ability of third-party platforms to integrate Q into their own services, and new procedures that will allow Q to perform tasks for them. its users via third-party applications such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Smartsheet, and others.
More questions at QuickSight
Previously, Q was already able to pull data from about 40 enterprise tools ranging from data warehouses like Amazon’s S3 to services like Google Drive, SharePoint, Zendesk, Box, and Jira. Q then creates a primary index of all 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 to provide more personalized results. This indicator, after all, is at the heart of Q’s capabilities.
Now companies will be able to take the data they’ve stored in databases, data warehouses and data lakes and combine it with the rest of their business data, whether it’s documents, wikis or emails – and they can now do it in Quick lookAWS Business Intelligence Service. The company says Amazon Q in QuickSight will allow employees to query this data and quickly create charts and graphs with the help of Q (or augment existing charts with content from a variety of sources).
These new features are now in preview.
More Q on third-party platforms
The feature that is perhaps the most interesting from a business perspective is that third-party services such as Zoom, Asana, Miro, PagerDuty, Smartsheet and others will now be able to integrate Amazon Q Business into their own services. These services will gain access to an Application Programming Interface (API) that will allow their AI-powered generative experiments to access the same index that Q uses as well.
Asana, for example, is integrating Q Business and Asana AI to help its customers find information from other third-party apps (indexed by Q) without having to leave Asana. From there, they can start a Q workflow and take actions in these third-party tools.
Likewise, Zoom will use the Q indicator to improve its AI assistant so that, for example, the Zoom AI Companion can transcribe and summarize a meeting while Q searches for documents, email, or wiki entries relevant to the call.
AWS emphasizes that all of these features will only display information that users have right to access.
In this context, it’s worth noting that others, including Atlassian’s Rovo, are also focusing heavily on third-party data integration (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 have third-party services integrate their assistants and indexes. This is an interesting play on AWS’s part.
More questions for more workflow
It has long been a dream of productivity nerds to automate more of the repetitive but difficult-to-automate processes that are an integral part of running a business. With this update, Q Business will now have a library of over 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 users can simply describe Workflow using natural language or uploading a document describing a specific process. They can also use a browser plugin to allow Q to capture step-by-step how the action is performed. Q Business then creates agents that can execute and maintain the workflow.
These workflows can run at specific intervals or can be triggered by specific actions.
The workflow automation market has become crowded with startups and established companies like Microsoft’s UiPath and Power Automate. But it appears that the advent of generative AI may finally allow some of these products to deliver on the promises of what was once called “robotic process automation.” These systems were often too fragile to use in the real world, but generative AI now allows for more flexibility in how these tools interact with third-party platforms.
The new automation feature will launch in 2025.
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