Amazon introduces Q, an AI chatbot for businesses
OpenAI has ChatGPT. Google has the Bard chatbot. Microsoft has its copilots. On Tuesday, Amazon joined the chatbot race and announced its own artificial intelligence assistant: Amazon Q.
The chatbot, developed by Amazon’s cloud computing division, is aimed at workplaces and not intended for consumers. Amazon Q aims to help employees with daily tasks such as summarizing strategy documents, completing internal support tickets, and answering questions about company policies. It will compete with other business chatbots including Copilot, Google’s Duet AI and ChatGPT Enterprise.
“We think Q has the potential to become a work companion for millions of people in their work lives,” Adam Selipsky, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, said in an interview.
Amazon has been in a race to shake off the threat perception that it is lagging behind in the AI competition. In the year since OpenAI released ChatGPT, Google, Microsoft and others have jumped into the frenzy, unveiling their own chatbots and investing heavily in AI development.
Amazon has been quieter about its AI plans until recently. In September, the company announced it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, an AI startup that competes with OpenAI, and jointly develop advanced computer chips. Amazon also introduced a platform this year that gives customers access to various AI systems.
Like the leading provider of cloud computingAmazon already has enterprise customers storing vast amounts of information on its cloud servers. Companies were interested in using chatbots in their workplaces, Selipsky said, but they wanted to be sure the assistants would protect those large amounts of company data and keep their information private.
Many companies “told me they had banned these AI assistants from the enterprise because of security and privacy concerns,” he said.
In response, Amazon built Q to be more secure and private than a consumer chatbot, Selipsky said. For example, Amazon Q can have the same security permissions that enterprise customers have already set for their users. At a company where a marketing employee may not have access to sensitive financial forecasts, Q can mimic that by not providing that employee with such financial data when requested.
Companies can also give Amazon Q permission to work with their corporate data that isn’t on Amazon’s servers, such as connecting to Slack and Gmail.
Unlike ChatGPT and Bard, Amazon Q is not built on a specific AI model. Instead, it uses an Amazon platform known as Bedrock, which connects several AI systems, including Amazon’s own Titan and systems developed by Anthropic and Meta.
The name Q is a play on the word “question,” given the conversational nature of the chatbot, Mr. Selipsky said. It’s also a play on the character Q from the James Bond novels, who makes stealthy, helpful tools, and a powerful “Star Trek” figure, he added.
Pricing for Amazon Q starts at $20 per user per month. Microsoft and Google both charge $30 per month for each user of the business chatbots that work with their email and other productivity applications.
Amazon Q was one of several announcements the company made at its annual cloud computing conference in Las Vegas. It also shared plans to strengthen its computing infrastructure for AI. And it expanded a longstanding partnership with Nvidia, the dominant supplier of AI chips, including building what the companies called the world’s fastest AI supercomputer.
Most such systems use standard microprocessors along with specialized chips from Nvidia called GPUs or graphics processing units. Instead, the system announced Tuesday will be built with new Nvidia chips that include processor technology from Arm, the company whose technology powers most mobile phones.
The shift is a worrying sign for Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, the dominant suppliers of microprocessors. But it’s positive news for Arm in its long-running effort to break into data center computing.
Don Clark contributed reporting from San Francisco.