Amazon expands enterprise AI play with wider availability of its Q chatbot

Amazon is doubling down on enterprise AI with the release of its AI chatbot Q, even as its competitors angle to offer more consumer-facing products.

Amazon announced Q in November and made it available only to a small number of users. In a post, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy writes that bringing Q to more people will help solve misalignment issues for developers. 

The chatbot acts as an assistant for Amazon Web Services (AWS) users, learning from a company’s data and workflows so employees can ask questions about their business. Users can also ask Q questions about coding, HR information, or logistics, Amazon says. 

Amazon’s AI focus has been largely turned toward other businesses, with most of its releases falling under the AWS banner. It operates Amazon Bedrock, a model library where companies can access Amazon’s large language models along with other popular open-source AI models like Llama 3, Claude 3, and Stable Diffusion. Other uses of Amazon Q have also been directed toward developers and companies.

“Already tens of thousands of our customers from different industry verticals to startups are already building and innovating on top of Bedrock as a foundation for their generative AI strategy,” AWS vice president of artificial intelligence and data Swami Sivasubramanian tells The Verge. 

These customers include companies like the website builder GoDaddy, National Australia Bank, financial services company Sun Life, and Toyota Connected North America, which develops cloud-based platforms for the car company. 

Amazon says it also added new capabilities to Q ahead of general availability. Amazon Q Developer provides coding assistance, app testing, security scanning, and troubleshooting. Developers can ask Q to list their AWS resources to see how much computing power they have or call up AI agents that autonomously perform tasks like software updates or documenting code. 

Amazon Q Apps, another new feature, aims to make building generative AI-based apps easier, even for employees without coding experience. Amazon says users just have to describe the type of app they want in a prompt, and Q will generate the app they’re looking for. 

The company has released AI tools that consumers can use, but these have mostly been on the Amazon retail site. In February, Amazon released Rufus, an AI shopping assistant that customers can ask about products.