Amazon Q Business

Question 1

What does Amazon Q Business do?

Answer 1

Amazon Q Business is a generative AI-powered assistant that can answer questions, generate content, create summaries, and complete tasks—all based on the information in your enterprise. Amazon Q Business is delivered using a built-in web experience or through APIs. This helps business users leverage the power of generative AI without any overhead.

Question 2

What problems does Amazon Q Business solve?

Answer 2

1. User experience

Amazon Q Business provides a built-in web experience that can be deployed for users to interact with the application. Additionally, Amazon Q Business can be embedded into existing enterprise applications such as Slack and Microsoft Teams to have a seamless user experience and conversation.

2. Time to value

With Amazon Q Business, you can quickly create a generative AI-powered digital assistant without any coding. It provides a user-friendly console, where an administrator can create an application with simple configurations. Amazon Q Business has built-in web experience, generative AI capability, data integrations to enterprise data sources, plug-ins for enterprise applications, and APIs.

3. Infrastructure overhead

Amazon Q Business is a fully managed service that removes all infrastructure overhead from application creation, deployment, or management.

4. User access controls

Amazon Q Business retrieves and uses the existing access controls for users within integrated enterprise applications and data sources. This allows the users to view the data with their existing authorization.

5. Data source integrations

Amazon Q Business provides 40+ built-in integrations to popular enterprise data sources like Amazon S3, Salesforce, Oracle, and so on. It can connect to both cloud-based and on-premise data sources

6. Guardrails

Amazon Q Business provides straightforward configurations for administrative controls and guardrails. For example, you can apply restrictions such as blocking specific words or topics.

Question 3

What are the benefits of Amazon Q Business?

Answer 3

1. Amazon Q Business quickly connects to your enterprise systems so you can have tailored conversations, solve problems, generate content, and take actions relevant to your business. It generates answers and insights according to the material and knowledge that you provide, backed by references and citations to source documents.
2. Amazon Q Business has over 40 built-in connectors to popular enterprise applications and document repositories, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Salesforce, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, Gmail, Slack, Atlassian, and Zendesk. This helps with faster integrations to your enterprise systems, providing a tailored response to user queries. The connectors include both cloud-based systems and on-premise systems.
3. Amazon Q Business is built to be secure and private. It can understand and respect your existing identities, roles, and permissions within enterprise data sources. If a user doesn’t have permission to access certain data without Amazon Q Business, they can’t access it using Amazon Q Business either. This reduces security overhead for administrators while providing relevant responses to individual user queries.
4. Amazon Q Business provides administrative controls, such as the ability to block entire topics and filter both questions and finalized answers using keywords. This helps ensure that it responds in a way that is consistent with a company’s guidelines. You can also choose to limit the response to the knowledge available in the connected data sources or allow Amazon Q Business to use its world knowledge to deliver a response.

Question 4

How does Amazon Q Business generative AI-powered assistant work?

Answer 4

1. Users are authenticated and authorized using a SAML 2.0 supported identity provider.
2. Users can provide a natural language query or prompt to the Amazon Q business web experience or chat application.
3. Amazon Q business has a built-in web experience for conversation. It has administered controls and guardrails. It uses generative AI capabilities, built-in data retrievers, application plug-ins, and APIs to deliver a tailored response.
4. Amazon Q Business has 40+ built-in connectors for data retrieval from enterprise data sources, which includes a list of native data retrievers and existing data retrievers.
5. A tailored response is provided back to the user or consumer. This response includes specific data from the enterprise data sources based on users’ existing access controls within those enterprise data sources.
6. A tailored response is provided back to the user or consumer. This response includes specific data from the enterprise data sources based on users’ existing access controls within those enterprise data sources.
7. Users can directly create enterprise application actions like creating tickets, cases, incidents, and issues from the Amazon Q Business web experience interface without separately logging into enterprise applications.
8. Actions are created in enterprise applications like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Jira, and Zendesk. These are integrated with Amazon Q Business using built-in plugins.

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Question 5

What are the basic technical concepts of Amazon Q Business?

Answer 5

1. To create and use an application in Amazon Q Business, you need to configure and connect IAM Identity Center. IAM Identity Center is not meant to replace your existing identity provider, rather it serves as an overlay to your identity provider of choice. If you already have an IAM Identity Center configured, you may use that or create a new one for your account to connect to the application.

Using IAM Identity Center, you can manage access to the application by assigning existing users or creating new users and groups from your identity center directory. Once the IAM Identity Center is connected to the application, assigned users can use the Amazon Q Business built-in web experience.

2. Generative AI foundation models are usually trained offline, making the model agnostic to any data that is created after the model was trained. Additionally, foundation models are trained on general domain data, making them less effective for domain-specific response or tasks.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique used to retrieve data from outside a foundation model and augment the prompts by adding the relevant retrieved data as context. This helps generative AI based digital assistants to provide tailored response, by augmenting enterprise data sources to a foundation model.

Amazon Q Business provides a fully managed RAG approach where administrators and users won’t have to manage the underlying data augmentations, prompt engineering, and vector embeddings. Administrators can configure Amazon Q to respond strictly from enterprise documents or allow it to use external knowledge to respond to queries when the answer is not available in enterprise documents.

3. Amazon Q Business supports access control for your data so that users have access to the right content based on their permissions. You can integrate your Amazon Q web experience with your external SAML 2.0-supported identity provider (such as Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, and Ping Identity) to manage user authentication and authorization.
4. Amazon Q Business has multiple pre-built connectors that can connect to your enterprise data sources so that you can implement your generative AI solution with minimal configuration. Connectors offer modes for full synchronization or incremental data synchronization.
5. Amazon Q Business has multiple pre-built connectors that can connect to your enterprise data sources so that you can implement your generative AI solution with minimal configuration. Connectors offer modes for full synchronization or incremental data synchronization.
6. Amazon Q provides built-in plugins to interact with popular third-party applications, such as Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Zendesk. Administrators can enable these plugins to extend the capabilities of their Amazon Q application.

Question 6

What are typical use cases for Amazon Q Business?

Answer 6

1. Using Amazon Q Business, you can accelerate content creation for various business functions like marketing, sales, research, HR, legal, and so on.
2. Using Amazon Q Business, you can integrate your enterprise systems and knowledge repositories using pre-built connectors. This provides a streamlined enterprise search experience where users can get relevant response with specific source references.
3. Using Amazon Q Business, you can quickly generate a summary of enterprise documents within repositories, content within systems, and uploaded files. This improves productivity and information consumption.
4. Using Amazon Q Business, you can generate and extract insights from multiple documents through natural language queries. You can compare documents, ask insight questions relevant to the documents, and more.

Question 7

How would you setup an Amazon Q Business application?

Answer 7

Here is a shortened step-by-step guide on setting up an Amazon Q Business application:

1 - Sign in to AWS, select N. Virginia region, enter “Amazon Q” and select it from results.

2 - From the Amazon Q Business landing page, choose “Get Started”.
In the Amazon Q console, select “Try a quick application”.
Enter an Application name, configure IAM Identity Center to manage users and access, create a new one if needed. After configuring, select “Create”.

3 - Assign users from IAM Identity Center directory to the application by adding new users or assigning existing ones.

4 - Select “Create application”. After successful creation, the new application will be listed with its web experience URL link.

5 - Select the “Web experience URL” link, authenticate the user, and access the application’s built-in web experience UI for conversations with the generative AI assistant.

Question 8

How do I chat with an Amazon Q Business application?

Answer 8

Here is a condensed step-by-step guide for chatting with Amazon Q Business:

1 - Access the Amazon Q Business web application that you set up previously and explore the user interface.

2 - Start a conversation in the prompt section by asking questions, but note that responses are initially restricted to approved sources only.

3 - To enable broader responses, navigate back to the Amazon Q Business console, select your application, and go to the Enhancements dropdown. Choose “Admin controls and guardrails” and then “Edit” in the Global controls section.

4 - Adjust Response Settings to allow the application to generate responses using data from connected sources or LLM (Large Language Model). Select the option to give users the choice between LLM-only responses or responses from connected data sources, then choose “Save”.

5 - Confirm the update with the banner indicating successful changes, then return to the assistant preview window.

6 - Start a new conversation using the prompt section. Use the settings button to toggle between restricting responses to approved sources or allowing LLM responses.

7 - Ask a question like “What is the capital of New York?” to receive a correct response based on the generative AI capability.

8 - Upload files during the conversation for summarization or specific questions. For example, upload the Amazon Q4 2023 transcript file.
Verify the upload in the prompt section and ask a specific question, such as “What was Amazon’s revenue in Q4 2023?” to receive an accurate response sourced from the uploaded file.