Amazon makes Q chatbot widely available ahead of earnings beat

Like the character of the same moniker in the James Bond movies, Amazon’s Q chatbot is here to help with your tech needs at work—though it probably can’t outfit you with a hidden-camera pen.

The shopping and cloud giant announced that its enterprise-focused generative AI will become generally available this week, with separate versions aimed at developers and businesses for a price of around $20 per month for the “pro” tiers.

The announcement came ahead of an AI-heavy earnings call in which a strong showing from the company’s AWS division helped power better-than-expected quarterly results.

Like other tech giants this quarter, Amazon is still seeing strong demand from companies looking to tap its cloud services to build their own AI, CEO Andy Jassy said in the call. AWS notched a 17% increase in YoY sales in the first quarter with an 84% YoY jump in profit.

Cue Q: Much of the idea behind Q, which featured heavily in the earnings call, is to help simplify and expedite that development process and thus make AWS potentially more attractive to businesses looking to park their AI operations, according to Doug Seven, GM and director of AWS AI developer experiences.

“Our enterprise customers, they’re really looking at how to make their business more successful and how to get more done with the resources they have and the time constraints they have,” Seven told Tech Brew. “They’re all under competitive pressure; they want to be faster.”

To that end, AWS is also adding a new preview feature to Q this week called Amazon Q Apps that can help users build workplace-specific AI-powered applications using natural language without much need for coding experience.

That adds to Q’s existing repertoire of tasks, which includes coding assistance, security scanning, and troubleshooting for the developer version, and summarization, information retrieval, and content generation for the business-catered version.

In another parallel to its 007 counterpart, Q also works with agents; in this case, AI assistants that can autonomously perform tasks like code upgrades and feature builds. Seven claimed this feature gives the company an edge over competing AI developer tools.

“I’m most excited about the agents. The agents are the thing I think really differentiates in terms of moving from synchronous assistance to asynchronous augmentation,” Seven said.

At what cost? But like its rivals in the AI arms race, Amazon faced questions from analysts about the price of all this AI investment. Jassy and Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky both mentioned in the earnings call that expenditures are set to “meaningfully increase” in 2024 due to spending on generative AI and AWS infrastructure.

“We expect the combination of AWS’s re-accelerating growth and a high demand for GenAI to meaningfully increase year-over-year capital expenditures in 2024,” Jassy said. “Given the way the AWS business model works, [this] is a positive sign of the future growth. The more demand AWS has, the more we have to procure new data centers, power, and hardware.”

But Jassy claimed that Amazon wouldn’t be sinking so much upfront spending into these projects unless it was confident it could make money off of AI.

“We don’t spend the capital without very clear signals that we can monetize it,” Jassy said.