AWS’ generative AI assistant Amazon Q now generally available

AWS has just announced that Amazon Q is now generally available. Amazon Q is a generative AI assistant designed for business use and it comes in two flavors: Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Q Business.

The developer version can assist with tasks such as code generation, testing, debugging, while the business version can be used to answer questions from company data, such as policies, product information, business results, or employee data.

According to AWS, only 30% of a developer’s time is spent actually coding, with most of the time spent doing things like learning from documentation or forums, managing infrastructure or resources, troubleshooting errors, refactoring code, and more.  

“Since we announced the service at re:Invent, we have been amazed at the productivity gains developers and business users have seen. Early indications signal Amazon Q could help our customers’ employees become more than 80% more productive at their jobs; and with the new features we’re planning on introducing in the future, we think this will only continue to grow,”  Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Artificial Intelligence and Data at AWS.

Amazon Q Developer can utilize the company’s own codebase to gain a deeper understanding of developer requests in the context of what they are already building to provide more personalized results.

AWS claims that based on customers who have already been using Amazon Q Developer, it has the highest acceptance rate for generated code of any AI assistant. The company says that BT Group accepted 37% of the suggestions and National Australia Bank accepted 50% of suggestions.

In addition to the assistant part of Amazon Q Developer, it also features “agents,” which can autonomously perform tasks like feature implementation, documentation, code refactoring, or performing software upgrades. For example, a developer could ask Q to create an “add to favorites” button in a social sharing app and Q will generate a step-by-step implementation plan. The developer then reviews the plan and can alter it before giving Q the approval to move forward with implementing its plan.

It also offers security scanning capabilities to detect vulnerabilities present in the codebase, like exposed credentials or log injection. 

Additionally, being an AWS product, it has a deep understanding of a company’s AWS environment and can make improvements to help optimize it. For instance, it can diagnose and resolve networking errors, optimize SQL queries and ETL pipelines, and provide architectural best practices. It also provides easy visibility into account resources, configurations, and billing information and trends. 

AWS says this allows it to answer queries such as “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?” 

“Amazon Q is the most capable generative AI-powered assistant available today with industry-leading accuracy, advanced agents capabilities, and best-in-class security that helps developers become more productive and helps business users to accelerate decision making,” said Sivasubramanian.