Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new solution that will allow companies, especially small businesses, to work smarter.
Amazon Q Business, an AI-driven generative assistant, is now generally available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. It is designed to make it easier for employees to access company information, receive quick answers, generate content, and make better decisions.
Key Features:
- Get instant, accurate answers from various types of data such as documents, images, audio, video, and beyond.
- Build light applications to automate tasks and make things easier.
- Speed up intensive tasks across systems with AI-driven automation.
- Seamlessly integrates with popular applications like Microsoft 365, Slack, and Amazon QuickSight.
- Secures data with administrative controls and role-based permissions.
For SMEs, Amazon Q Business guarantees substantial time savings. Report generation, which previously took two weeks, is now done in two days. Preparation time for quotes is reduced by half, enabling businesses to close 25% more deals. By automating repetitive tasks, employees can concentrate on more critical work, ultimately leading to productivity and growth. Amazon Q Business seamlessly integrates with over 40 popular systems such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Amazon S3, making it easy to pull information from multiple systems into one place. It offers permission-based, secure access with full citations for all findings for transparency and data integrity.
This launch is part of AWS’s ongoing $22.3 billion investment in Australia’s digital economy, helping businesses of all shapes and sizes become more efficient, compete on an even footing, and expand without going broke. With Amazon Q Business, SMEs finally have a powerful tool to level the playing field with larger competitors.
“We are empowering Australian customers and partners across all industries to transform their operations through generative AI and Amazon Q Business,” said Nam Je Cho, Director of Solutions Architecture at AWS Australia and New Zealand. “Amazon Q Business represents a fundamental shift in workplace productivity, providing secure, comprehensive answers with citations and intelligent document summarisation. Teams can now access and analyse information faster than ever before, enabling data-driven decisions that drive business value. From streamlining customer service to accelerating research and development, Amazon Q Business helps organisations optimise their processes while maintaining enterprise-grade security.”
Amazon Q Business is already optimising productivity in the workplace, from financial institutions streamlining risk assessment documentation, to healthcare providers accelerating patient care coordination, to HR teams helping employees more easily navigate their benefit programs. For example, Amazon Q Business is also helping employees across Amazon work more efficiently, including generating more than 100,000 account summaries for the AWS Sales team, and reducing the time developers spend churning on technical investigations by more than 450,000 hours. This includes customers and partners in Australia like Arcanum AI and Ingram Micro.
“Implementing enterprise-grade generative AI may seem out of reach for small and medium-sized businesses. We’ve transformed this perception by helping companies across manufacturing, construction, and professional services modernise their operations with Amazon Q Business. Its ability to automate manual processes while maintaining security and compliance delivers significant productivity gains and often saving hours of manual work daily. Customers are growing twice as fast without adding headcount, cutting quote times in half to win 25% more deals, and reducing report generation from two weeks to just two days. Our remote deployment model ensures quick implementation, and as we expand our industry connectors and AI assistant libraries, we’re positioned to help even more businesses transform their operations through accessible, practical generative AI solutions,” said Asa Cox, Arcanum AI CEO.
“As a global technology distributor and solutions aggregator, Ingram Micro is excited to bring Amazon Q Business to our vast network of partners in Australia and New Zealand. We believe that AI-powered apps and solutions can enable our channel partners to boost their operational efficiency and deliver enhanced value to their customers. Amazon Q Business has potential to help our partners streamline their workflows, improve decision-making processes, and reduce time spent on routine tasks. With Amazon Q Business AI apps our partners will be able to create customised solutions which in turn may help them address specific business challenges and scale their operations effectively. As organisations continue to embrace AI-driven digital transformation, Ingram Micro is committed to empowering our partners with solutions like Amazon Q Business that drive innovation and business growth,” said Phil Duke, Ingram Micro Senior General Manager Cloud, (ANZ).
Amazon Q Business will be available to customers and partners using cross-region inference profiles. Cross-region inference automatically routes inference requests to the optimal AWS Region, prioritising the source region to minimise latency and enhance user experience. This approach helps to ensure continuous performance for customers and partners even during peak demand periods. It is also cost-effective as charges are only incurred on the source region of the request, with no routing costs. Customers with data residency preferences can opt to run and store Amazon Q Business workloads exclusively within the AWS Sydney Region.
AWS has a long-term commitment to boosting the digital economy in Australia by supporting customers to leverage the latest AI and cloud technologies. AWS has invested more than $9.1 billion in the country since the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in 2012. AWS launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region in 2023 and also announced plans to invest more than $13.2 billion in local infrastructure, supporting more than 11,000 jobs annually by 2027. These investments will accelerate innovation and drive economic growth and are estimated to contribute $35 billion to Australia’s gross domestic product by 2027.
AWS is helping customers and citizens across the world to upskill in the latest digital technologies such as generative AI. Since 2017, AWS has trained more than 400,000 people with cloud skills in Australia.
Anyone interested in learning more about using Amazon Q and Q Business can access four free courses adapted to all levels of technical experience, including Amazon Q Business: Getting Started, which helps users tap into their organization’s own knowledge base, and Amazon Q Developer: Getting Started, which assists developers in using AWS applications to code faster.
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