On Tuesday, Amazon unveiled Q, a new chatbot designed for workplace use, during the Amazon Web Services’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas. This move is Amazon’s attempt to compete with Microsoft and Google in the productivity software arena. Q’s launch follows the emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which Microsoft backs, known for its generative AI capabilities in producing human-like text.
Q, whose name is inspired by characters from the James Bond and Star Trek franchises, is currently in a preview version. Some of its features are free, but post-preview, it will offer a business tier at $20 per person per month and a more advanced tier for developers and IT workers at $25 per person per month. This pricing undercuts the similar offerings from Microsoft 365’s Copilot and Google Workspace’s Duet AI, both priced at $30 per user per month.
The chatbot is initially tailored to assist with navigating AWS services and troubleshooting, as explained by AWS CEO Adam Selipsky. Q is integrated into communication platforms like Salesforce’s Slack and developer text-editing tools, and it’s also accessible via AWS’ Management Console. Notably, Q can cite documents in its responses and automate source code modifications, reducing developers’ workload. It connects to over 40 enterprise systems, allowing users to interact with data from Microsoft 365, Dropbox, Salesforce, Zendesk, and AWS’ S3 service.
“AWS Q will be a game changer for AWS customers who have a plethora of service options, oftentimes overlapping to navigate,” Steven Dickens, vice president and practice leader at the Futurum Group, a technology industry research firm, wrote about the product. “AWS has resisted the urge to make an AI assistant for each service in its portfolio and, as a result, I expect to see Q become widely adopted in the months ahead by both developers and cloud admins alike.”
Amazon’s foray into end-user applications, including supply chain management, email, encrypted messaging, video calling, customer service, and marketing, hasn’t produced a major hit yet. AWS’s main revenue still comes from its core computing and storage services. In managing Q, AWS Vice President Deepak Singh notes that administrators will have control over the chatbot’s ability to answer general queries.
