How Amazon’s New Entreprise AI Assistant Amazon Q Could Heat Up Big Tech’s AI Race

Amazon (AMZN) announced Tuesday its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Amazon Q for businesses and developers is generally available in the U.S. for AWS enterprise customers, in a move that could help the e-commerce giant better compete with its big tech peers amid the AI boom.

Amazon Q Business for AWS Enterprise Customers

The generative AI (genAI) tool for business customers, which was first unveiled at the AWS re:Invent conference in November of 2023, “can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in [the customer’s] enterprise systems.”

“With Amazon Q Business, you can deploy a secure, private, generative AI assistant that empowers your organization’s users to be more creative, data-driven, efficient, prepared, and productive,” the company said in a release.

The enterprise AI assistant has a variety of features that businesses can customize to align with their organization’s workflow and goals. Amazon said it can connect to more than 40 enterprise data sources including Microsoft 365, and Salesforce, as well as be used to create a chatbot built on company-specific data to answer employees’ questions, among other capabilities.

Amazon Q Business is available through two subscription options. Amazon Q Business Lite “provides users access to the basic functionality of Amazon Q Business” and is priced at $3 per user per month, while the Amazon Business Pro option offers users access to all features for $20 per user monthly.

Amazon Q Developer Offers Coding-Specific Help

Alongside Amazon Q Business, the company announced the general availability of Amazon Q Developer, a coding-specific AI assistant.

“Q assists developers and IT professionals (IT pros) with all of their tasks—from coding, testing, and upgrading applications, to troubleshooting, performing security scanning and fixes, and optimizing AWS resources,” Amazon said in a release.

AWS offer a free tier of Amazon Q Developer, “which provides free coding to individuals in the IDE and command line, as well as free limited usage of most advanced capabilities, like Amazon Q Developer Agents” as well as an Amazon Q Developer Pro tier priced at $19 per user per month for more advanced capabilities and higher limits.

Microsoft and Google Already Offer Similar AI Assistant Subscriptions

Amazon Q Business could help Amazon compete as Microsoft (MSFT) and Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL) already have enterprise AI assistants.

Microsoft offers Copilot which can be integrated into its Office 365 products, while Google has Gemini which can be connected to Google Workspace apps. Both companies also offer coding-specific tools for developers.

Meta recently unveiled its own AI assistant called Meta AI, though the tool, which is integrated into its platforms, is designed for individual consumer use rather than enterprise.

Amazon announced the availability of the enterprise AI assistant Tuesday morning, ahead of the e-commerce giant’s earnings report set after market close.

Amazon shares were 0.6% lower at $179.83 around 3:15 p.m. ET Tuesday, though they’ve gained more than 18% year to date.