Partner POV | Accelerate software development and leverage your business data with generative AI assistance from Amazon Q

This article was written by Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Data and Machine Learning at AWS, and it was submitted for publication by our partner, AWS.

We believe generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform virtually every customer experience. To make this possible, we're rapidly innovating to provide the most comprehensive set of capabilities across the three layers of the generative AI stack. This includes the bottom layer with infrastructure to train Large Language Models (LLMs) and other Foundation Models (FMs) and produce inferences or predictions, the middle layer with tools to easily and rapidly build generative AI applications, and the top-layer where we're investing in game-changing applications. While all of these layers are important for the advancement of generative AI, I'm excited today to share more on our investments in the top application layer.

With the assistance of generative AI, everyone from developers and business analysts to employees in specialized areas like customer service or supply chain operations, can be more productive, creative, and data-driven than ever before. But for generative AI apps and assistants to be truly useful at work, they must know an organization's data, their customers, their operations, and their business. Many of today's assistants can't be easily personalized and they weren't designed to meet the data privacy and security requirements companies need.

That's why we invented Amazon Q, the most capable generative AI-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging business data. I'm excited to share that Amazon Q Developer, Amazon Q Business, and Amazon Q in QuickSight are available today along with several new features. You can see a quick breakdown of today's announcement and demos in this video from Dr. Matt Wood.

Amazon Q is the most capable work assistant available today, and we built it with security and privacy in mind from the start- if an employee can't access a data source normally, they can't access it through Q either.

We are bringing you a ton of great capabilities and experiences today, and I thought I'd call out a just a few.

Amazon Q Developer – your assistant for the entire software development lifecycle

Amazon Q Developer helps developers and IT professionals (IT pros) with all of their tasks—from coding, testing, and upgrading, to troubleshooting, performing security scanning and fixes, optimizing AWS resources, and creating data engineering pipelines. Customers are already seeing the value in Amazon Q Developer: Eviden, a digital transformation services company, is experiencing 20-40% in productivity gains; Switchboard MD, a healthcare company, has reduced their time to deploy new features for products by 25%; and Datapel Systems, a warehouse management and inventory stock solutions company, is achieving a remarkable efficiency improvement of at least 70%.

Amazon Q Developer helps developers build faster and more securely by generating code suggestions and recommendations in near real time. In fact, 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 reporting they accepted 37% of Q's code suggestions and National Australia Bank reporting a 50% acceptance rate. Previously, some of these coding assistant capabilities were provided by Amazon CodeWhisperer, and are now part of Amazon Q Developer.

Amazon Q Developer agent capabilities can autonomously perform a range of tasks–everything from implementing features, documenting, and refactoring code, to performing software upgrades. You can ask Amazon Q Developer to add a new checkout feature to your e-commerce app, and it will analyze your existing codebase, map out the implementation plan spanning multiple files, and upon your approval, execute all the required code changes and tests in minutes. Check out this feature in action, Implement an API with Amazon Q Developer Agent for Software Development. Carrying out these tasks, the agent for software development achieved the highest scores of 13.4% on the SWE-Bench Leaderboard and 20.5% on the SWE-bench Leaderboard (Lite), a dataset that benchmarks coding capabilities. These updates will be available to customers in the coming days.

Q can also automate app upgrades, reducing days of work to minutes. Recently, a five-person Amazon team used the Amazon Q Code Transformation agent to upgrade over 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. Today, Amazon Q performs Java language upgrades, and cross-platform .NET upgrades are coming soon to accelerate migrations to Linux saving customers millions in licensing fees. Check out the code transformation agent in action, Upgrade a Java App with Amazon Q Developer Agent for Code Transformation.

Starting today, you can also ask Q Developer questions about your AWS account (preview) like "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 Business empowers employees to be more creative, data-driven, efficient, prepared, and productive

Our vision for Amazon Q Business is to make the power of generative AI accessible to every business to get insights from all their data (unstructured and structured), take actions, and build applications.

Most companies have troves of valuable data that is hard to access and parse through. With Amazon Q Business, employees can get answers to questions across business data such as company policies, product information, business results, code base, people, and many other topics by connecting to enterprise data repositories to summarize the data logically, analyze trends, and engage in dialog about the data. To make this possible, Amazon Q Business has more built-in, managed and secure data connectors to connect your enterprise data than any other generative AI assistant. This includes commonly used business tools, such as wikis, intranets, Atlassian, Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). You can even build custom plugins enabling Amazon Q Business to directly take actions like submitting time-off requests. Need the latest sales figures summarized? Looking for competitive intel on a prospective client? Amazon Q Business's advanced language capabilities will quickly synthesize relevant info from scattered documents, databases and chat logs, into a coherent response.

One of the most exciting announcements today is a feature of Amazon Q Business called Amazon Q Apps. Amazon Q Apps helps every employee go from conversation to building generative AI-powered app in seconds, making it much easier to streamline and automate daily tasks. Creating an application with Amazon Q Apps is straightforward—employees can describe the type of app they want in natural language, or just tell Amazon Q Apps to do it from a conversation where Amazon Q helped solve a problem. For instance, a marketer could ask Q Apps to create an app that generates compelling customer stories by just inputting the customer's name, products used, business challenge, and business impact. In seconds, Q creates the app that is then shareable to other marketers throughout the organization.

Recently, I sat down with Praerit Garg, President of Product & Innovation at Smartsheet, to discuss how Amazon Q Business is helping their employees get answers faster and ultimately improve productivity, as well as onboard new hires more quickly.

Generative BI allows analysts to build detailed dashboards in minutes and business users to get insights fast

Historically, businesses have stored large amounts of their valuable structured data in their databases and data warehouses, which are usually accessible only through business intelligence (BI) tools. When business executives needed to extract information from the data, they had to rely on over-taxed business analysts to build dashboards, which could often take days or weeks. Even when dashboards were created it was difficult to extract and share important insights from these dashboards. Now, Amazon Q brings its advanced generative AI technology to Amazon QuickSight, AWS's unified 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 reduce the time to build a BI dashboard from hours to minutes. And it helps everyone in an organization become more data-driven by making data more accessible. It is 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–for instant answers, and create detailed and customizable data stories highlighting key insights, trends, and drivers. All you have to do is say what you want in natural language.

Showpad, a leading provider of sales enablement solutions, is able to give customers the ability to query data without the need for a complex user interface or the need-to-know SQL. Integration took just a little over a week, and Showpad was able to customize the experience so it blends seamlessly into their own experience. And Clinigence Health, a healthcare information technology company, is leveraging Amazon Q in QuickSight to identify insights and trends within data in minutes, a process that previously took hours.

New pricing including Amazon Q Developer Free Tier

Along with these new features, we're also announcing new pricing tiers that make it even easier to use Amazon Q. We are offering an Amazon Q Developer Free Tier, which provides free coding to individuals in the IDE and command line, as well as free limited usage of most advanced capabilities, like Amazon Q Developer Agents. For customers who want organizational license management, the ability to customize Amazon Q Developer to their codebase for more relevant coding suggestions, as well as higher limits on advanced capabilities, we are offering the Amazon Q Developer Pro tier for $19 per user per month. The Amazon Q Business Pro subscription at $20 per user/per month provides users access to the full suite of Amazon Q Business capabilities, including access to Amazon Q Apps and Amazon Q in QuickSight (Reader Pro). Finally, you can access a free trial of Amazon Q Developer Pro and Amazon Q Business Pro until June 30, 2024.

We're excited about bringing you these new capabilities across Amazon Q Developer, Amazon Q Business, and Amazon Q in QuickSight. We are just getting started in helping you be more productive, better leverage your organizational data, and create new ways of working.