AWS CEO: How GenAI Amazon Q Is ‘Transforming’ Developers

‘This year alone, Amazon Q has resolved over 1 million internal Amazon developer questions, reducing time spent churning on manual technical investigations by more than 450,000 hours,’ says AWS CEO Matt Garman.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman says the company’s generative AI assistant, Amazon Q, is transforming the $110 billion company by taking developer productivity to new heights.

“Amazon Q is transforming how our teams find information across Amazon,” said Garman on LinkedIn Friday. “The numbers are pretty amazing. This year alone, Amazon Q has resolved over 1 million internal Amazon developer questions, reducing time spent churning on manual technical investigations by more than 450,000 hours.”

AWS on-boarded Amazon Q with millions of internal documents and integrated Q into tools AWS teams use every day, such as Slack.

“Now, instead of waiting hours for responses to complex technical questions on Q&A boards or Slack channels, developers get answers in seconds,” said Garman. “Less time waiting, and more time innovating.”

The Seattle-based company is currently the worldwide market-share leader in cloud computing at 31 percent, followed by Microsoft at 20 percent share and Google at 13 percent share.

How AWS’ Amazon Q Strategy Worked

AWS developers were having trouble finding answers to complex technical questions in a timely matter. Developers could post a question on AWS internal Q&A boards or find the appropriate channel in Slack to ask the technical questions. But it might take hours for subject matter experts to respond.

“The answers to these questions often already exist somewhere in our knowledge base but the developer couldn’t find that needle in the collective haystack of tools and repositories that we have at Amazon,” said Alexandru Baluta, senior software development engineer at AWS, in a blog post.

Baluta said AWS integrated Amazon Q Business with tools that they were already using like community message boards and Slack.

AWS ingested its internal knowledge repository consisting of millions of documents into its GenAI Amazon Q Business product so developers could get answers based on data across those repositories.

In addition, the company integrated Amazon Q Business instances with the tools where developers commonly ask questions. Lastly, AWS used context inherent to the tools themselves—such as the Slack channel in which a user was asking a question—to provide more useful responses.

“As a result, Amazon Q Business has already answered over 1 million internal Amazon developer questions this year,” said Baluta. “[It’s] reduced the time it takes for a developer to get an answer to seconds.”

AWS Partner InterVision Driving Amazon Q

AWS AI all-star partner InterVision is currently deploying and scaling Amazon Q for customers to help them retrieve answers and information instantly.

“A lot of clients have just amazing amounts of data that is unstructured or in PDFs,” said Jonathan Lerner, president and CEO of Chesterfield, Mo.-based InterVision. “But if you think about all the data that they have inside of their buildings, pretty much every answer to every question is somewhere hidden in that documentation or in that data.”

Like AWS, InterVision is driving customer and developer efficiency with Amazon Q, while also leveraging it to help with troubleshooting issues in cloud applications or group chats as well as to summarize documents.

“We’ve woven AI and intelligent automation in all its forms—RPA [rapid process automation] and bots and into everything we do,” said Lerner. “We view AWS as the best builders on the planet.”

Last week, AWS reported third-quarter 2024 revenue of $27.5 billion, representing a sales increase of 19 percent year over year.