Amazon Q - Your Expert for Building on AWS

- So critically, other providers who have launched tools, they've launched 'em without data privacy and security capabilities that virtually every enterprise requires. And so many CIOs actually banned the use of a lot of these most popular chat assistant inside their organizations, and this has been well publicized. And just ask any Chief Information Security Officer or CISO, and they'll tell you, you can't really bolt on security after the fact and expect it to work, as well.

It's much, much better to build security into the fundamental design of the technology. So when we set out to build generative AI applications, we knew we had to address these gaps, had to be built in from the very start, and that's why today, I'm really proud and excited to announce Amazon Q, a new type of generative AI-powered assistant designed to work for you at work. (audience cheers and applauds) Q lets you answer questions quickly with natural language interactions.

You can easily chat, generate content, take actions, that's all informed by an understanding of your systems, your data repositories, your operations, and, of course, we know how important rock solid security and privacy are, so that Q understands and respects your existing identities, your roles, and your permissions. If a user does not have permission to access something without Q, they cannot access it with Q either. And we've designed Q to meet enterprise requirements, enterprise customers, stringent requirements from day one.

And we never want business customers content. We're never gonna use that content for Q to train underlying models. I really believe this is gonna be transformative.

We want lots of different kinds of people who do lots of different kinds of work to benefit from Amazon Q. Now, as you might expect, we want Q to help developers and builders be more efficient, more knowledgeable, and more proficient. So for starters, Amazon Q is your expert assistant for building on AWS.

Now, to supercharge work for developers and IT pros, we've trained Amazon Q on 17 years worth of AWS knowledge, so it can transform the way you think, optimize, and operate applications and workloads on AWS, and we put Amazon Q where you work. So it's ready to assist you in the AWS management console and documentation in your IDE via CodeWhisperer. And in your team chat rooms like Slack.

You can chat with AWS Q to explore AWS capabilities, learn unfamiliar technologies, architect solutions. It's an expert in AWS, well architected patterns, best practices, and solution implementations. For example, you could ask Amazon Q, how do I build a web application with AWS?

What are my options? It's gonna answer with a list of potential services that you could use such as Amplify, Lambda, or EC2, and then it's gonna offer reasons why you might consider each service. From there, you can further narrow down your options through natural language, like which of these would be preferred if my app is only needs to run for a few seconds, and only has very infrequent traffic?

Lambda. Amazon Q's gonna take your requirements into consideration, and is gonna provide you with the best possible recommendations. And once you've chosen a service, you can ask Amazon Q, how do I get started?

And Q's gonna give you step-by-step instructions for configuring the solution, plus links to relevant information to documentation and so on. And this is just the beginning of how Amazon Q is gonna help you with your work. For example, if you encounter an error with Lambda in the console, you just press the troubleshoot with Amazon Q button, and Q is gonna research the error, and it's gonna suggest how to fix it.

Amazon Q can also troubleshoot your network connections. It can analyze your end-to-end network configuration, and help resolve connectivity issues quickly. That is a huge time saver.

Now, what else can Q help us with? How about choosing the optimal EC2 instance? So you can just tell Q about your workload, and get an accurate, quick, and economical instance type recommendation.

For example, which EC2 instance types provide the highest performance for video encoding and transcoding workloads supporting gaming use cases? And you get your recommendation, it's that easy. This is all very cool, and we expect that Amazon Q is gonna save customers so much time architecting and troubleshooting, and are optimizing your workloads, but that's not all the Q can do for you.

Amazon Q is also gonna be in the IDE for developers. If you're unfamiliar with the code in the IDE, or you need to dig in into how a specific function works, Amazon Q in CodeWhisperer is gonna help you get up to speed by using its deep knowledge of AWS and its understanding of your code bases. So you need to add tests, just ask Q, and it's gonna automatically generate the test for you.

And this is gonna make a huge difference for developers, but we knew we could do even more to help you build even faster. For example, think about everything that goes into building a new feature. You have to understand requirements, think through design, write all the code, add tests, document the code, and so on.

And a file could span hundreds to even thousands of lines of code, and this is a daunting task. If you're using Amazon CodeWhisperer, it's gonna generate chunks of new code for you, which is a real time saver, but that still leaves all the rest. So this sounds like a job for Amazon Q, specifically, Q's feature development capability, which is gonna automate the multi-step development task of adding new features to your application.

So instead of all that work, now you just write a prompt, and Q is going to use its expertise enriched with an understanding of your project code, and it's gonna do all the heavy lifting for you. So Amazon Q will create the draft plan, which you can then collaborate, and iteratively improve using natural language chat till it's polished and ready to go. And then Q really kicks into gear, it's gonna implement the plan across your files in your application, and you remain in control using your expertise to review changes and ensure the very best quality.

So this is hours of work that Q can do for you with just one good prompt. And this feature is available today in Amazon CodeCatalyst, and will soon be fully available in the IDE. You'll not currently find an AI assistant from another major cloud provider that can do this for you today, but we're not done yet.

Let's keep going. We know that developers spend a lot of time slogging through the muck that comes with maintenance and upgrades. Maintenance and upgrades, big deal, right?

So take language version upgrades, for example. How many of you're using older versions of Java, because it's gonna take months or even years to upgrade? Hands?

Oh yeah, a lot of 'em. So migrations are inevitably come with a lot of nuance and edge cases. And so you end up spending a ton of time writing and rewriting the code over and over again, and trying to get it compile to compile and work.

And sometimes, these programs take so long that it feels like you're in a migration infinity loop just as one ends, the next begins. It's not hard to understand the temptation to just maintain status quo, but doing that, means you miss out on performance improvements. And it means much worse that it can also open you up to potential security vulnerabilities.

And that's why we built into Amazon Q Code Transformation, which helps you with upgrades and to transform code in a fraction of the time that it takes today. All the developer has to do. .

. (audience cheers and applauds) All a developer has to do is ask Q to perform the code transformation, and it handles the rest. From identifying and upgrade and mandatory code package depositories and frameworks, to replacing deprecated code and incorporating security best practices.

Q's even gonna run tests on the upgraded application. So we've been using this application, this capability internally, and the results are stunning. So with Amazon Q Transformation, a very small team of Amazon developers successfully upgraded a thousand applications from Java 8 to Java 17 in just two days.

Now, I'm gonna say that again, 1,000 application upgrades in two days. That's how long a single application upgrade used to take. (audience cheers and applauds) I mean, this is months, months if not years, of developer time saved.

A lot of very happy people at Amazon over this, I promise you. So today, Amazon Q can work its magic on Java upgrades, but soon, you're gonna be able to use it to help migrate your dotnet workloads from Windows to Linux. And there are a lot of applications out there stuck on Windows because of the sheer effort required in making the migration.

And this is an opportunity for huge cost savings on costly licensing fees on top of the inherent performance and the security benefits. Well, what about the other people in your organization? All the folks in marketing, finance, HR, product management, and more.

There's so much information spread across your organization's documents, all of your data, all of your applications, and people in all of these different roles, they struggle every day to find the information that they need to then transform it into making decisions, and taking actions and doing that fast enough to stay competitive. Hmm, finding relevant information, making recommendations, taking actions, that sounds familiar, right? Yep.

Amazon Q is also your business expert. Q has connections to over 40 popular enterprise systems. So employees across the organization can ask complex questions and get detailed, accurate, nuanced answers that are relevant to their role at work.

And again, Q is secure and private, it respects your existing roles and the permissions that are granted uniquely to each user. We're really excited about this, and I actually wanted to show you just a little bit of Amazon Q and for your business in action. So to put Q through its paces, please welcome AWS's own, Dr Matt Wood to the stage.

(upbeat music) - Thanks, Adam, and good morning, everyone. I'm excited to give you a first look at Amazon Q, a new type of AI assistant designed to be an expert in your business. With Amazon Q, you can get quick, accurate, relevant answers to your most pressing business questions all delivered securely and privately.

Getting started with Q is simple and takes just three steps. First, you configure Amazon Q by connecting and customizing Q with details of your own organization. Q connects to existing data sources like S3, Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, Slack, and more, supporting over 40 popular business applications and services right out of the box.

Once connected, Amazon Q starts indexing all of your data and content, learning everything there is to know about your business. This includes understanding the core concepts, product names, organization structure, all the details that make your business unique. As well as indexing the data from these sources, Q also uses generative AI to understand and capture the semantic information, which makes your business unique.

This additional semantic information is captured as vector embeddings, allowing Q to provide highly relevant results, which are tailored to your specific company and industry. Your data remains completely under your control at all times. Amazon Q never shares it externally, or uses it to improve any of the underlying models.

And that's it, surprise, there is no step three, just open Amazon Q in your browser, and away you go, with a fully customized secure assistant who is an expert in your business. You communicate with Q through this friendly web application designed for everyone in your organization to use. Q knows who you are and about your identity and role.

And because Q understands your business semantics, you can ask far more detailed, nuanced questions, and get tailored answers faster than ever before. For example, you could ask Q to analyze which product features customers are struggling with, and recommend ways to improve them. As soon as you hit enter, Q gets to work on understanding your question and preparing an answer.

Q starts by creating a set of input prompts automatically. Q then uses all of the business context available to find relevant data, information, and documents, and picks the best ones before combining everything together into a response all in just a fraction of a second using the power of generative AI. Amazon Q remains faithful to your original sources, citing them in lines, so that you can validate the information easily.

Q's experience might be magical, but there is no magical black box just giving you answers. You can upload new Word documents, CSVs, and other files on the fly to Q to incorporate into its responses, letting you ask questions about ad hoc data, which hasn't yet been added to any corporate system. And Amazon Q was built with privacy and security in mind from the ground up.

So even if you were to seek information to which we don't have access, Amazon Q respects your existing access controls only returning information you're authorized to see. Admins can also restrict sensitive topics, filtering out inappropriate questions and answers where necessary. Finally, Amazon Q can take actions on your behalf through a set of configurable plugins.

As an example, if you update, say, your training priorities, Q can automatically create tickets in Jira, notify leaders in Slack, and update dashboards in ServiceNow. Q allows you to inspect actions before they run, so you can review them and add additional information. And after the action runs, Q will link to the results for verification.

So in summary, Amazon Q brings AI assistant into the business world providing secure, relevant, and actionable guidance tailored entirely to your company. We can't wait for you to try Q, and see how it will help your organization. With that, back to Adam, thanks a lot.

(upbeat music) - That was awesome. Amazon Q is gonna make a huge difference for businesses. Employees are gonna love how Amazon Q is gonna help solve problems, discover and synthesize new information, and lift folks out of monotonous, drag, repetitive tasks.

And IT is gonna love how all of this comes with rigorous security and privacy. Now, I know at least a few of you out there are wondering, if Amazon Q can access my data, does that mean it can help with my business intelligence? And, of course, the answer is resounding yes.

So we've been working for a while to make business intelligence more accessible to people without BI expertise. We think anyone should be able to ask questions of their data using natural language. And so Amazon QuickSight, our ML-powered BI service now has Amazon Q features built in.

First, Amazon Q is gonna help reduce the time that it takes business analysts to create dashboards and reports from hours down to minutes by letting them simply tell Amazon Q what they wanna visualize. For example, regional sales by product has a Sankey diagram. Q comes right back with that diagram, and you can add it to your dashboard with ease, and you can tell Q to further refine the visual.

Say you wanna change the chart to a vertical stack bar chart by month and color code it by region, your wish is Q's command. With Q, you can get better dashboards faster, but even the best dashboards don't tell every angle of the story. For example, you can ask Amazon Q, where did we have the highest sales?

And you can get a response customized to your business data. You can ask a follow-up question even as little as one word like, London. And because Q maintains the context of your current conversations, you can get insights from your data quickly.

Now, enabling people to talk to Q and QuickSight is a big step forward in helping your organization be even more data-driven, but not everyone is getting hands-on with data. A lot of people consume data through presentations and reports. And so, so much of you do a work is telling stories with data.

And as your business expert, Q is here to make that easier, too. Let's say you wanna create a monthly report on your business in North America. You can ask Q to write a monthly report about the business, and make recommendations for next month.

And Q's gonna give you visualization options, you choose the ones you want, and then Q will format them. And in seconds, you have a beautiful and compelling story, and it's completely customizable. You can actually add more context to this section by asking Q to add a visual of the usage trend.

And Q will generate a short summary, and then you can further tweak it by making it longer, shorter, or reformatting it to bullets. Let's make it longer. Once we're happy with the story, we can securely share it with others.

With Amazon Q and QuickSight, you now have an expert BI assistant that's gonna make it easier for business analysts and it's gonna make it easier for end users to get answers to end insights faster. And these new Q capabilities in QuickSight are available in preview today. (audience cheers and applauds) Now, a lot of organizations are looking for solutions that are targeted to horizontal use cases or specific lines of business.

And AWS has applications in these areas, too. So our first specialized line of business solution was Amazon Connect. So it's born in the cloud, and, of course, Amazon Connect is a scalable, cost-effective, easy to use contact centers application that's reinvented customer service.

Generative AI that knows your business is gonna have an incredibly impact on the whole customer service experience across so many different industries, your customer service teams are at the heart of your businesses delivering interactions that people remember for good and for bad. So getting this right really matters. Today, contact center agents spend a lot of time gathering information from customers to understand their questions, and then they spend even more time searching for the right answer.

Now, Connect has made this a lot easier already with machine learning transcription analytics, but we knew we could make it even better for your agents and certainly for the customers waiting on the other end of the line for help. Enter Amazon Q and Connect available today, and this is gonna give contact center agents a major assist. Agents can chat with Q directly inside of Amazon Connect to help them respond quickly to customer questions.

Live chat with Q with fast answers is great, but what if you can make the call itself the prompt? Now, inside of Connect, Q is actually there on the calls, assisting with proposed responses with suggested actions or with links to relevant articles, no typing required. So contact centers, supervisors, and administrators are also gonna get a generative AI boost.

Connect now automatically creates post-call summaries that supervisors can use to track follow-up actions and to uncover agent coaching opportunities. And for administrators, Connect can set up chat bots and interactive voice responses through simple, natural language prompts, streamlining the process. Amazon Q is just the first of many specialized industry and use case specific services that are gonna supercharge Amazon Q, so stay tuned.

Amazon Q Builder, your AWS expert. AWS Q Business, your business expert. Amazon Q and QuickSight, your business intelligent expert.

And Amazon Q and Connect, your contact center expert, all engineered to offer assistance that remains faithful to the information that you choose to feed it, and with the built-in security and privacy, that you know and that you count on from AWS. And this is just the start of how we're gonna help to reinvent the future of work.