Amazon has recently introduced its own business-oriented artificial intelligence-powered assistant, known as “Amazon Q.” This AI chatbot is designed to facilitate conversations, resolve issues, generate content, extract valuable insights, and establish connections with a company’s information repositories, code, data, and enterprise systems. This announcement was made by Amazon Web Services (AWS) on November 28th.
Q is an integral part of Amazon’s comprehensive strategy to incorporate generative AI throughout its product ecosystem, catering to both consumer and private sector needs. The company envisions this tool as a valuable asset for employees, offering immediate and relevant information, advice, and streamlining tasks. It aims to expedite decision-making and problem-solving while fostering creativity and innovation in the workplace.
During a CNBC interview on November 28th, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky highlighted the benefits of Q for employees in various departments, including human resources, legal, product management, design, manufacturing, and operations. He emphasized that Q has been trained on 17 years’ worth of AWS data, further enhancing its capabilities.
Notable customers of AWS, such as financial firms Vanguard and Deloitte, telecommunication companies Samsung and Verizon, and entertainment conglomerate Disney, could potentially leverage the AI chatbot once a more comprehensive version becomes available. Currently, Q is only offered in preview mode in Oregon and northern Virginia within the United States.
It is important to note that Amazon’s Q is distinct from Q*, an AI project developed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. The latter project faced controversy recently when its founder and CEO, Sam Altman, was initially dismissed and then reinstated. Amazon has heavily invested in the AI sector, including a $4 billion investment in Anthropic, the team behind the Claude 2 chatbot, across multiple ventures. Anthropic extensively utilizes computational power from AWS.
In 2023, two major competitors of Amazon, Google and Meta, released their own AI chatbots, namely Google Bard and LLaMA, respectively. Additionally, Microsoft has made significant investments, totaling approximately $13 billion, in OpenAI.