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

Q Business, which AWS introduced at last year’s re:Invent, can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content and perform tasks based on an organization’s data. It integrates with over 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 Asana Inc.’s workflow project management product – to provide conversational search and answer retrieval that spans all of an organization’s data.

Q Business delivers contextually relevant answers that factor in company policies, organization and structure. The assistant creates an index that serves as a canonical – or definitive- source of content and data across an organization. It also maintains the index and applies security controls that comply with existing user-level access permissions.

Gen AI for business intelligence

Integration with QuickSight allows users to tap Q Business capabilities from within the BI platform to get answers that include visuals like charts and graphs. Q Business and Q in QuickSight now work from the same index of enterprise data. In addition to third-party applications, users can now access data contained in documents, emails, data lakes and other unstructured sources within the business and combine it with data from business applications.

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

Customers can now expand and enhance quality of Q Business responses by granting independent software vendors access to data from multiple applications via a single application program interface. The result is more personal experiences with greater context while enabling organizations to retain full control of their data. AWS can manage a single index on their behalf to eliminate the need for each application to make a copy.

Extended third-party integration allows users on a videoconference, for example, to use Zoom Communications Inc.’s AI Companion to transcribe and summarize the meeting while Q index retrieves relevant documents from places like Google Docs, Slack or Microsoft Outlook emails. Documents are only visible to users who already have access to them.

More than 50 automated actions

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

Another new capability due next year will use generative AI to discover and automate complex workflows without programming. That means a business user can choose to describe a workflow using natural language, upload a document detailing a process or use a browser plugin to capture on-screen interactions. Q Business uses a series of agents to create, edit and maintain the workflow. Workflows can be configured to run at set intervals or triggered by specific requests.

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

Photo: AWS