AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon Q, the Most Capable Generative AI-Powered Assistant for Accelerating Software Development and Leveraging Companies’ Internal Data

Rhea-AI Summary

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon Q, a generative AI-powered assistant that accelerates software development and leverages internal data for companies. Amazon Q offers advanced coding accuracy, security, cloud capabilities, and the ability to build generative AI apps. Customers like Accenture, Toyota, and others are already benefiting.

Positive

• Amazon Q provides developers with highly accurate coding recommendations in real-time, enhancing productivity and innovation. The service offers customization for more relevant code suggestions, ensuring efficiency. Q's security scanning capabilities excel in detecting vulnerabilities, improving application security. Q automates and manages application upgrades, saving time and enhancing performance.

Negative

• Developers need to spend time learning existing code bases to understand programming logic and implementing new features. The service may require a learning curve for users unfamiliar with generative AI applications. Companies may need to invest time in customizations to optimize the use of internal data repositories.

Insights

Tech Industry Analyst

The release of Amazon Q appears to be a significant step in the application of generative AI to software development and business productivity tools. By automating tasks such as coding, security vulnerability scanning and creating business intelligence dashboards, Amazon Q could potentially reduce labor-intensive processes and accelerate project timelines. The high acceptance rates of Amazon Q's code suggestions by large organizations suggest a robust and reliable platform that could impact developer efficiency. Moreover, the addition of Amazon Q Apps extends the power of generative AI to non-technical users, democratizing the creation of applications and potentially leading to a substantial increase in productivity across various departments. This innovation aligns with the broader industry trend towards low-code and no-code solutions, potentially increasing AWS's market share in the cloud services domain.

Financial Analyst

With the launch of Amazon Q, Amazon.com, Inc. is enhancing its AWS offerings, which could fortify its competitive edge in the cloud services market. Investors should monitor AWS's revenue growth trajectory, as this new service could help in customer retention and attract new clients due to its cost-saving and productivity-enhancing features. The reported productivity gains and time savings in application upgrades, as well as Amazon Q's potential to become the industry standard for generative AI in professional environments, could contribute positively to Amazon's financial performance in the long run, potentially affecting the stock positively. The emphasis on security and privacy in Amazon Q Business also addresses key enterprise concerns, which could increase the adoption rate among security-sensitive industries.

Cybersecurity Expert

Amazon Q's approach to security vulnerability scanning and remediation is noteworthy. Offering best-in-class security features and an ability to autonomously detect and suggest fixes for vulnerabilities addresses a critical pain point for developers. As cyber threats evolve, tools that can quickly and accurately identify potential security risks are essential. The fact that Amazon Q outperforms other publicly benchmarkable tools in this area could make it an invaluable asset to developers. Furthermore, its strict privacy policy, which doesn't use customer content to train its models, is important in an era when data privacy is paramount. This could be a decisive factor for organizations prioritizing the security of their intellectual property.

Amazon Q Developer’s industry-leading coding accuracy, best-in-class security, and most comprehensive cloud capabilities allow developers to spend more time coding and less time on maintenance

Amazon Q Business empowers employees to be more data-driven, generate content, build dashboards, and make better, faster decisions using company knowledge and data

Amazon Q Apps, a new and powerful capability of Amazon Q Business, enables employees to use natural language to quickly and securely build their own generative AI applications to automate daily tasks

Customers and partners across all industries and of all sizes, including Accenture, BlackBerry, Brightcove, BT Group, Datadog, DAT Freight & Analytics, Deriv, Eviden, GitLab, GoDaddy, Hapag-Lloyd, National Australia Bank, NCS, Netsmart, Persistent Systems, Showpad, Slalom, Smartsheet, Sun Life, Tata Consultancy Services, Traeger Grills, Toyota, Wiz, and others are using Amazon Q to transform the way their employees get work done

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced the general availability of Amazon Q, the most capable generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging companies’ internal data. Amazon Q not only generates highly accurate code, it also tests, debugs, and has multi-step planning and reasoning capabilities that can transform (e.g., perform java version upgrades) and implement new code generated from developer requests. Amazon Q also makes it easier for employees to get answers to questions across business data such as company policies, product information, business results, code base, employees, and many other topics by connecting to enterprise data repositories to summarize the data logically, analyze trends, and engage in dialog about the data. Today, AWS is also introducing Amazon Q Apps, a new and powerful capability that lets employees build generative AI apps from their company’s data. Employees simply describe the type of app they want, in natural language, and Q Apps will quickly generate an app that accomplishes their desired task, helping them streamline and automate their daily work with ease and efficiency. To learn more about Amazon Q, visit aws.amazon.com/q.

“Amazon Q is the most capable generative AI-powered assistant available today with industry-leading accuracy, advanced agents capabilities, and best-in-class security that helps developers become more productive and helps business users to accelerate decision making,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Artificial Intelligence and Data at AWS. “Since we announced the service at re:Invent, we have been amazed at the productivity gains developers and business users have seen. Early indications signal Amazon Q could help our customers’ employees become more than 80% more productive at their jobs; and with the new features we’re planning on introducing in the future, we think this will only continue to grow.”

Amazon Q Developer

Today, developers tell us that only 30% (or less) of their time is spent on coding, while the rest is spent performing tedious and repetitive tasks. This could be researching best practices from various parts of the web or learning how things work through documentation, forums, and conversations with colleagues. Developers also have to manage infrastructure and resources, troubleshoot and resolve errors, and understand operating costs. When they switch projects, they have to spend time learning the existing code base to understand its programming logic. Finally, there is all the work of testing and refactoring code, upgrading applications, debugging and optimization, and ensuring security by having to carry out vulnerability scanning and applying appropriate security fixes in a timely fashion. Companies want to empower their developers to spend less time on this coding muck and more time on creating unique experiences for their end users, while being able to deploy faster.

Q assists developers and IT professionals (IT pros) with all of their tasks—from coding, testing, and upgrading applications, to troubleshooting, performing security scanning and fixes, and optimizing AWS resources. Amazon Q delivers advanced and tailored generative AI capabilities, including:

• Most accurate coding recommendations: Amazon Q helps developers build faster and more securely by generating code suggestions and recommendations in near real time. Customers such as Blackberry, BT Group, and Toyota are already using Q to increase developer productivity and speed up innovation in their organizations. Amazon Q Developer has the highest reported code acceptance rates in the industry, for assistants that perform multi-line code suggestions, with BT Group recently sharing that they accepted 37% of Q’s code suggestions and National Australia Bank reporting 50% acceptance rates. Q also has a powerful customization capability that securely leverages a customer’s internal code base to provide more relevant and useful code recommendations. With this capability, Q is an expert on your code and provides recommendations that are more relevant to save even more time. Q keeps customizations completely private, and the underlying foundation model (FM) does not use them for training, protecting customers’ valuable intellectual property.
• Amazon Q Developer Agents: Q has a unique capability, called agents, which can autonomously perform a range of tasks–everything from implementing features, documenting, and refactoring code, to performing software upgrades. Developers can simply ask Amazon Q to implement an application feature (such as asking it to create an “add to favorites” feature in a social sharing app), and the agent will analyze their existing application code and generate a step-by-step implementation plan. Developers can collaborate with the agent to review and iterate on the plan before the agent implements it, connecting multiple steps together and applying updates across source files, code blocks, and test suites. Carrying out these tasks, Q has achieved the highest scores of any software development assistant available today, scoring 13.4% on the SWE-Bench Leaderboard and 20.5% on the SWE-Bench Leaderboard (Lite), a dataset that benchmarks coding capabilities.
  
  To save customers months, even years, of time upgrading applications, Q can also automate and manage the entire upgrade process–with Java conversions available today and .Net conversions coming soon to help people move from Windows to Linux. In their integrated development environment (IDE), developers simply ask Amazon Q to “transform” their project and the agent analyzes application source code, generates new code in the target language or version, executes tests, and completes all code changes. A five-person team at Amazon used Q to upgrade more than 1,000 production applications from Java 8 to Java 17 in just two days (the average time per application was less than 10 minutes), saving months of time, and improving application performance–previously, many of these applications would each take a couple of days to upgrade.

• Best-in-class security vulnerability scanning and remediation: Q scans code for hard-to-detect vulnerabilities, such as exposed credentials and log injection. With a single click, Q automatically suggests remediations tailored to the application code, allowing developers to quickly accept fixes with confidence. Q’s security scanning capabilities outperform leading publicly benchmarkable tools on detection across most of the popular programming languages, helping to significantly improve the security and code quality of a developer’s application.
• Q is an expert on AWS and optimizing your AWS environment: Amazon Q Developer is an expert on AWS and is in the console to help IT pros optimize their cloud environments, as well as diagnose and resolve errors and networking issues, select instances, optimize structured query language (SQL) queries, extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines, and provide guidance on architectural best practices. To further help customers optimize their cloud environments, today Amazon Q Developer includes a new feature that helps customers list their AWS account resources, configurations, and analyze billing information and trends, making it easier for them to manage their accounts. For example, IT pros can simply ask, “What instances are currently running in US East 1?” or “What’s my S3 bucket encryption?” or “What were my EC2 costs by region last month?” and Amazon Q Developer will list the resources and details in a summarized answer with links to learn more.

Amazon Q’s conversational interface is available wherever it is needed—in the AWS Console, in Slack, or in IDEs, including Visual Studio Code and JetBrains–to give developers the ability to use the conversational experience of Q within their favorite software development solutions. To extend the Q experience to more places developers work, AWS is announcing new partner extensions from Datadog and Wiz, and an integration with GitLab Duo that will offer joint customers a unified interface—whether working in AWS or GitLab. By integrating Amazon Q’s generative AI capabilities with solutions that developers know, use, and trust, developers can update and create software faster.

Amazon Q Business

Organizations possess vast amounts of data spread across multiple documents, systems, and applications. Employees across every organization and department spend hours every week searching internal sources for information, piecing together analyses, writing reports, building presentations, gathering insights from dashboards, and adapting content for different audiences. Generative AI can help solve these challenges. However, the offerings available today are not connected to business data or internal resources and are not built from the ground up with security in mind. Because of these barriers, many organizations cannot safely tap into the full potential of generative AI.

Q Business is a generative AI–powered assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in your enterprise systems. It empowers employees to be more creative, data-driven, efficient, prepared, and productive:

• Q unites more data sources than any other generative AI assistant available today: Amazon Q Business easily and securely connects to 40+ commonly used business tools, such as wikis, intranets, Atlassian, Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)–more than any other generative AI assistant available today. Simply point Q at your enterprise data repositories, and it will search all of your data, summarize logically, analyze trends, and engage in dialog with end users about the data. This helps business users to access all of their data, no matter where it resides in their organization.
• Built from the ground up with security and privacy in mind: Amazon Q Business seamlessly integrates with a customer’s existing identities, roles, and access permissions to personalize the interactions for each individual user, while maintaining the highest levels of security. It generates accurate responses based on enterprise information, and customers can restrict sensitive topics, block keywords, and filter out inappropriate content. Q also does not use customer content to train the underlying models for anybody else. Amazon Q Business outperforms all published results for other assistants on correctness, truthfulness, and helpfulness for general Q&A (using the MultiHop-RAG dataset), as well as industries like finance (using a FiQA dataset sample) and technology (using a LoTTE dataset sample).
• Inventive generative BI allows analysts to build detailed dashboards in minutes and business users to get insights fast: Amazon Q brings its advanced generative AI technology to Amazon QuickSight, AWS’s unified Business Intelligence (BI) service built for the cloud. With Amazon Q in QuickSight, customers get a Generative BI assistant that allows business analysts to use natural language to build BI dashboards in minutes and easily create visualizations and complex calculations. It is also the only BI product where business users can get AI-driven executive summaries of dashboards, ask questions of data beyond what is presented in the dashboards, and create detailed and customizable data stories highlighting key insights, trends, and drivers. Business users can ask to “build a story about how the business has changed over the last month for a business review with leadership;” and in seconds, Amazon Q creates a narrative with specific insights and supporting visuals, including specific ideas of how to improve the business. Users can choose to layout the content produced by Q in an easy to share document or presentation where they can customize text, images, and themes, and use Amazon Q to rewrite and improve the text.
• First-of-its-kind capability that helps every employee go from conversation to generative AI-powered app in seconds: Today, AWS is announcing the new Amazon Q Apps capability (in preview). Amazon Q Apps allows employees to easily and quickly create generative AI-powered apps based on their company data, without requiring any prior coding experience. With Q Apps, employees simply describe the app they want, in natural language, or they can take an existing conversation where Amazon Q Business helped them solve a problem, and with one click, Q will instantly generate an app that accomplishes their desired task that can be easily shared across their organization.
  
  For example, creating employee onboarding plans for new recruits can be a long and laborious process. They require many hours of searching through different data stores and documents to find the appropriate content for the new employee; and often, the content is out of date or not specific enough to their role. With Q, an HR professional could simply describe they want an app that will create an onboarding plan for a new employee that utilizes the company’s existing best practices, and has an input field for employee ID that personalizes the onboarding plan to their role by drawing from internal data sources specific to their job family. In a matter of seconds, Amazon Q Apps will build an app that can automatically generate a personalized onboarding plan tailored to the employee, their role, and the department using the latest best practices. The HR professional can then share the app with hiring managers across the company to instantly build personalized onboarding plans for their own teams. Now, with Amazon Q Apps, business users can easily, quickly, and securely build an app based on enterprise information to improve their work productivity.

What Amazon Q customers and partners are saying

GoDaddy helps millions of entrepreneurs globally start, grow, and scale their businesses. “Amazon Q in QuickSight allows us to ask our data contextual business questions without having to constantly rely on ad-hoc dashboards. For example, now we can much more easily discover and drill into anomalies in business performance across the company,” said Ed Sarausad, senior director of Data & Analytics at GoDaddy. “This shift not only streamlines our processes, but also elevates our analytical capabilities. What excites us most is the opportunity to unlock insights with profound, previously unasked questions. That allows us to respond more swiftly and with greater depth, enhancing our data learning journey.”

National Australia Bank is one of the largest financial institutions in Australia. “At NAB, teams across the bank are excited about how generative AI can transform our work, and we've found a great solution in Amazon Q Developer, a powerful generative AI-powered tool for our engineers and developers,” said Andrew Brydon, executive chief engineer at National Australia Bank. “The tool has seamlessly integrated advanced generative algorithms and tools into our development process, delivering unparalleled benefits like completing tasks faster, increasing productivity, and minimizing repetitive actions. So far, our developers have accepted 50% of the code suggestions made by Amazon Q Developer, and that number continues to increase as we scale. We look forward to seeing how Amazon Q Developer will continue to empower and inspire our engineers to upskill their technical expertise, delivering better service for customers.”

Netsmart is a leading technology provider for community-based care. “The demand for community-based care has grown exponentially, and Amazon Q Developer is helping us meet that demand by fueling our efficiency and innovation,” said Paul Snider, vice president of engineering at Netsmart. “Amazon Q Developer can transform the way our engineering team approaches research, design, and coding. Since using Amazon Q Developer, our team has seen a strong code suggestion acceptance rate of 35%. This has allowed our engineers to efficiently generate high-quality code and documentation, implement new features, which can accelerate development cycles, and significantly reduce manual effort. We are excited about the impact of Amazon Q Developer on our development processes.”

Novacomp provides a diverse range of IT products and services while specializing in Quality Assurance Automation, Software Testing services and Nearshore Outsourcing. “Modernizing applications at Novacomp has historically been a time-consuming task that is often de-prioritized against other development initiatives,” said Gerardo Arroyo, CTO of Novacomp. “Our team turned to Amazon Q Code Transformation to help upgrade a project running in Java 8 to Java 17 with over 10,000 lines of code. This is a task that would typically take an expert over two weeks to manually complete, but Amazon Q seamlessly modernized our project in a matter of minutes. Since adopting Amazon Q across our organization, we have realized a 60% decrease in average in our tech debt.”

Persistent Systems is a multi-national technology services company that builds software that drives digital transformation. “Amazon Q Apps has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach generative AI,” said Praveen Bhadada, head of generative AI at Persistent Systems. "We can now empower everyone on the team to quickly build and integrate applications with a no-code approach, using enterprise data sources while carefully aligning with existing identities, roles, and authorization levels.”

Smartsheet is an enterprise software as a service offering for collaboration and work management. "Amazon Q Business is streamlining knowledge management and accelerating employee productivity at Smartsheet," said Bani Bedi, senior vice president of corporate development and strategy at Smartsheet. "Previously, it was too difficult for our 3,300 employees to find the information they needed across public help documents, training courses, and hundreds of all-employee Slack help channels. We have consolidated our organizational knowledge into a single AI engine to give our workforce immediate answers, significantly boosting employee productivity. Now, employees can simply tag @AskMe in any Slack channel, ask a question, and Amazon Q will instantly give them an answer. Our CEO uses Amazon Q Business to obtain answers and conduct research, getting the information that he needs without interrupting an employee’s workflow. We accomplished all of this in a couple of weeks and without writing a single line of code, using our existing identity system. Additionally, our engineering teams use Amazon Q to summarize incident statuses, identify action items, access API documentation, and troubleshoot technical issues more efficiently, so they can focus on delivering exceptional products to our customers."

Sun Life is a leading international financial services organization. "Together with AWS, we're leveraging generative AI to help our people work more efficiently and deliver superior digital experiences to our clients," said Laura Money, EVP & chief information and technology innovation officer at Sun Life. "Adopting Amazon Q Apps will enable our teams to build secure and seamless solutions that create value and differentiation across our business. For example, empowering our teams with access to Amazon Q in just a few clicks will streamline the creation and sharing of applications tailored to their respective needs."

Toyota Connected North America leads the development of Toyota’s cloud-based digital Connected Mobility Intelligence Platform. "Toyota is committed to delivering exceptional digital experiences and continuously pushing boundaries for our customers. We realized that we needed to take a closer look at some of our supporting platforms, and evaluate architecture, tech debt, and needed upgrades, including our aging 4GL code repositories," said Dave Tsai, VP of engineering at Toyota Connected North America. "Amazon Q Business provided our team insights into the areas of most critical need, accelerating the effectiveness of our technical debt assessment by 25%. With Amazon Q Developer's Code Transformation capability, we look to harness generative AIs increasing capabilities to accelerate applications and services upgrades by up to 30%."

About Amazon Web Services

Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 105 Availability Zones within 33 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240430010984/en/

Amazon.com, Inc.

Media Hotline

Amazon-pr@amazon.com

www.amazon.com/pr

Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

FAQ

What is Amazon Q?

Amazon Q is a generative AI-powered assistant by AWS that accelerates software development and leverages internal data for companies.

Which companies are using Amazon Q?

Companies like Accenture, Toyota, and GoDaddy are using Amazon Q to transform their work processes.

What are the key features of Amazon Q?

Amazon Q offers advanced coding recommendations, customization, security scanning, and automation of application upgrades.