Amazon Q: Generative AI for companies

The wait is over: Amazon finally announced the general availability of Amazon Q at the end of April. The generative AI assistant is designed to accelerate software development and make optimal use of internal company data. We give you an overview of the latest developments and functions of Amazon Q.

Amazon Q Developer: Optimized software development

The solution developed from CodeWhisper aims to support development teams when writing code. The focus is on security and cloud capabilities. According to Amazon, developers spend less than 30 percent of their time coding. The rest is spent on research, troubleshooting and debugging.

Amazon Q Developer supports developers andIT professionals with the following tasks, among others:

- Coding: The chatbot creates code recommendations and suggestions in real time.

- Updates: So-called agents independently take care of implementing and documenting new features and upgrades.

- Security: Q scans the code for vulnerabilities, such as compromised logins and injection attacks

The chat interface integrates with the AWS console, Slack and development environments such as Visual Studio Code or JetBrains.

Amazon Q Business: Smart company data

Data is the new gold. But digging is just as complicated as in the Wild West. How many hours a day do you spend searching for documents and information? Not just in folders, but in different systems and servers. The effort involved in creating a presentation quickly becomes disproportionate.

Generative AI can help with this. But only if the chatbot can access internal company data will it be really exciting and could give Amazon a decisive competitive advantage over OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Bard. Amazon advertises that it can connect to over 40 tools: Wikis, intranets, Atlassian, Salesforce, Slack, Gmail or Exchange are just a few of them. The existing role and identity management is taken over during setup. Additional security and data protection functions also ensure that sensitive data remains protected.

Amazon Quicksight, the business intelligence tool from AWS, also benefits from the intelligent functions of Amazon Q. Analyst teams can use clear voice commands to create BI dashboards, charts and graphs or run complex queries. An example: "For a meeting with the management, I need a presentation on how the department has changed in the past month." Amazon Q uses this prompt to create a storyline including diagrams and visualizations. The results can be exported as a document and further customized. Or you can have Amazon Q revise the text straight away.

Amazon Q Apps: Automate tasks

To adapt the potential of the chatbot even better to your own company, teams can use simple voice commands to build generative AI applications and automate routine tasks.

For example, HR teams can create an app to onboard new employees. Amazon Q uses existing examples to automatically create a personalized onboarding plan that is tailored to the new team member, role and department. And all without any programming knowledge. This function is still only available as a preview.

Mastering AI and ML with skill IT

With the course "The Machine Learning Pipeline on AWS" you prepare yourself and your team for Amazon Q and the topic of generative AI. You will gain insights into how the ML pipeline can be used to solve real business problems. As a developer , in the course "Developing on AWS" programming skills and get support from Amazon Q later on.