OpenAI has ChatGPT. Google has the Bard chatbot. Microsoft has its co-pilots. On Tuesday, Amazon joined the chatbot competition and announced its own artificial intelligence assistant: Amazon Q.
The chatbot, developed by Amazon’s cloud computing division, is aimed at workplaces, not consumers. Amazon Q’s goal is to help employees with everyday tasks such as summarizing strategy documents, filling out internal support tickets, and answering questions about company policy. It will compete with other enterprise chatbots including Copilot, Google’s Duet AI and ChatGPT Enterprise.
“We believe Q has the potential to become a work companion for millions and millions of people,” Adam Selipsky, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, said in an interview.
Amazon is struggling to shake off the impression that it is lagging behind in the AI competition. In the year since OpenAI released ChatGPT, Google, Microsoft and others have gone crazy introducing their own chatbots and investing heavily in AI development.
Until recently, Amazon was more reserved about its AI plans. In September, the company announced it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, an AI startup that competes with OpenAI, and will jointly develop advanced computer chips. Amazon also launched a platform this year that gives customers access to various AI systems.
As a leader in cloud computing, Amazon already has business customers storing massive amounts of information on its cloud servers. Companies are interested in using chatbots in their workplaces, Mr. Selipsky said, but they want to ensure that the assistants protect these reams of corporate data and keep their information private.
Many companies “told me that they had banned these AI assistants from the company because of security and privacy concerns,” he said.
In response, Amazon designed Q to be more secure and private than a consumer chatbot, Mr. Selipsky said. For example, Amazon Q can have the same security permissions that business customers have already set up for their users. In a company where a marketing employee may not have access to sensitive financial forecasts, Q may mimic this by not providing such financial information to the employee upon request.
Companies can also give Amazon Q permission to work with their company data that is not on Amazon’s servers, such as connecting to Slack and Gmail.
Unlike ChatGPT and Bard, Amazon Q is not based on a specific AI model. Instead, it uses an Amazon platform called Bedrock that connects multiple AI systems, including Amazon’s own Titan as well as those developed by Anthropic and Meta.
The name Q is a play on the word “question,” given the conversational nature of the chatbot, Mr. Selipsky said. It’s also a reference to the character Q in the James Bond novels, who creates hidden, helpful tools, and a powerful “Star Trek” character, he added.
Amazon Q pricing starts at $20 per user per month. Microsoft and Google each charge $30 per month for each user of the company’s chatbots that work with their email and other productivity applications.
Amazon Q was one of numerous announcements the company made at its annual cloud computing conference in Las Vegas. The company also shared plans to improve its AI computing infrastructure and expanded a long-standing partnership with Nvidia, the dominant AI chip provider, including by building what the companies called the world’s fastest AI supercomputer.
Most of these systems use standard microprocessors along with special chips from Nvidia called GPUs or graphics processing units. Instead, the system announced Tuesday will be built with new Nvidia chips that incorporate processor technology from Arm, the company whose technology powers most cell phones.
The shift is a worrying sign for Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, the dominant microprocessor suppliers. But it’s positive news for Arm in its longstanding effort to break into data center computing.
Don Clark contributed reporting from San Francisco.