Image credit: NYTimes
OpenAI ChatGPT. Google Bard. Microsoft Copilots. And now, it’s Amazon Q.
Amazon Q is an AI chatbot developed by Amazon, and it focuses on workplaces instead of consumers. The tool is intended to assist employees with day-to-day activities like summarizing strategy documents, answering questions from consumers, etc.
Adam Selipsky, the chief executive of Amazon Web Services, says:
“We think Q has the potential to become a work companion for millions and millions of people in their work life.”
Joining the race of developing chatbots and other AI development, Amazon announced in September that it would invest around $4 billion in Anthropic, which is an AI start-up competing with OpenAI. In addition, Amazon has also launched a platform allowing customers to access different AI systems.
Amazon is a leading cloud computing provider, so it already has business clients using its services. Selipsky says their clients are already interested in using chatbots, but they want to be sure that these chatbots will safeguard their corporate data and information.
He said,
“Many companies told me that they had banned these AI assistants from the enterprise because of the security and privacy concerns.”
He adds that Amazon Q is more secure and private than any consumer chatbot. For example, at a company where marketing professionals may not access sensitive financial forecasts, Q can emulate that by prohibiting employee access to such financial data. In Addition, companies can give Amazon Q permission to work with their data that isn’t available on Amazon’s servers, such as connecting with Gmail and Slack.
When it comes to pricing, Amazon Q starts at $20 per user each month. This is lower compared to Microsoft and Google, both of which charge $30 a month for each enterprise user.
The name Q stands for “Question” because of the chatbot’s conversational nature. The name also gets inspiration from the character Q in the James Bond novels, who makes helpful tools, as well as on the powerful “Star Trek” figure, as stated by Selipsky.
Navkiran Dhaliwal is a seasoned content writer with 10+ years of experience. When she's not writing, she can be found cooking up a storm or spending time with her dog, Rain.
