AMAZON OFFERS ITS Q AI ASSISTANT TO BUSINESS USERS

Amazon is far more than an online store giant--its global Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud system provides core IT infrastructure for businesses of almost every size. Now AWS is rolling out a new AI system called Q that embraces the buzziest of buzzy technologies, allowing businesses to "transform the way their employees get work done." The company blog explains that Amazon Q is "the most capable generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging companies' internal data." That's sales pitch lingo at work--but what Q offers is actually quite powerful, and might live up to the hype. Since this sort of AI assistant is all about enabling companies to do more with less, benefits to smaller enterprises with smaller teams with less diverse experience could have a greater impact that it might at larger companies. Q's capabilities appear to split into three major parts. The first is all about coding--a vital skill for many businesses, even if their core offerings aren't based on technology. That's because nearly everything in our world is digital, and that code is its working language. Amazon's blog post says developers claim they spend less than 30 percent of their time on actual coding, while the rest of the day is spent on "tedious and repetitive tasks" and managing IT infrastructure matters. This is "coding muck," Amazon says, and it obviously hits company bottom lines. Q takes aim at this muck, harnessing AI tools that can perform tedious tasks like quickly debugging already-written code automatically. Amazon follows industry trends here--writing code is a key ability of many existing chatbot systems, and Microsoft is even tying AI systems into its social media-like code repository GitHub. Current-generation AI systems also excel at analyzing and summarizing huge amounts of data, something Q includes to help business users. The company's press release includes a slide showing Q being used as part of Amazon's "business intelligence" Quicksight system, quickly summarizing an imaginary company's sales and profit data. Done by an employee, this is a tedious, time-consuming task that requires specific expertise. A small company can use Q to bolster its expertise and save lots of time, Amazon says. Customized AIs can be notably beneficial to individual companies--either because a custom-trained AI can focus on business-specific needs. A small business can use it to create, say, a customer-facing chatbot that understands specifics about its products and business operations, and explain them quickly. Q touts its ability to do this, and also includes a sort of "no-code" approach, meaning any employee can ask it to create a custom AI system just using straightforward language like: "Build me an onboarding app for our new hire Sarah." Amazon certainly isn't the first company to offer all this sort of business-centric AI tech. Microsoft, OpenAI and many others offer some of the same services. But the tech giant's advantage here is its ready-made customer base: many companies already use Amazon's cloud systems making it easy to pitch its AI systems to them as well. Amazon's hawking its Q AI very hard, and notes that since its unveiling, several companies are testing it. Based on this it says Q can help "employees become more than 80 percent more productive at their jobs." Hopefully this means that employees are more relaxed and, thanks to AI, have a wider skill set with which to tackle tasks without being overworked. There is some evidence that using AI harms staff well-being, and previous studies show some employees are wary of embracing AI tech. Their biggest suspicion is they're merely training an AI that will eventually replace them, and there's some truth to this. On that note, Amazon's press release says with the confidence of a tech evangelist that "new features we're planning on introducing in the future," employee productivity "will only continue to grow." BY KIT EATON @KITEATON