Amazon's Copilot competitor is called Q and aimed at enterprise

During its re:Invent 2023 developers conference, Amazon announced its own artificially led chatbot called Q which will be targeted at enterprise customers.

Interestingly enough, Amazon hosted a hardware event two months ago where it mentioned on several occasions that a new AI-powered platform would power its devices but Q is not that.

What can Q do?

Amazon Q is aimed at commercial use rather than consumer facing applications. Amazon Q was demoed as helping employees with productivity tasks that include document summarization, accessing company policy wiki’s, and filing support tickets.

 As a marketing manager, you could ask Amazon Q to transform a press release into a blog post, create a summary of the press release, or create an email draft based on the provided release. Amazon Q searches through your company content, which can include internal style guides, for example, to provide a response appropriate to your company’s brand standards. Then, you could ask Amazon Q to generate tailored social media prompts to promote your story through each of your social media channels. Later, you can ask Amazon Q to analyze the results of your campaign and summarize them for leadership reviews.

AWS News Blog by Antje Barth

Q vs Copilot in enterprise

While Google’s AI chat bot Bard attempts to straddle the line of consumer and commercial uses, Microsoft and Amazon seem poised to provide separate but specific enterprise focused chatbot experiences with their respective Microsoft Copilot and Amazon Q platforms.

Amazon is hoping that its Q AI chatbot will offer a level of flexibility that could help it claw back mindshare from the likes of Microsoft and Google that include giving companies the ability to sync corporate data not currently available to Amazon servers but can connect through common apps such as Gmail and Slack.

Similar to Microsoft, Amazon touts a more secure user privacy focus with the development of Q.

AWS never uses customers’ content from Amazon Q to train the underlying models. In other words, your company information remains secure and private.

AWS News Blog by Antje Barth

While Microsoft and Google are leaning away from anthropomorphizing their new AI chatbots, Amazon has playfully named Q as a passing reference to the question-answering and gadget-providing James Bond assistant as well as a play on the word “question.”

Amazon is also looking to undercut Microsoft and Google by charging $20 per month. Unlike Amazon, both Microsoft and Google charge $30 a month for their representative enterprise chatbot offerings that streamline into their own productivity suits and widely used email clients.

Also similar to Microsoft, Amazon extended plans with NVIDIA to build out GPUs for its Q platform.

Following the announcement, Amazon opened up a preview of Q that is available to developers in the following AWS regions of US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon).

Interested developers can visit the following link or head over to the Amazon Q Slack Gateway GitHub repository for instructions on how to set up a Slack instances powered by Q.