Amazon Q Business FAQs

Amazon Q Business is the most capable generative AI-powered assistant for finding information, gaining insight, and taking action at work. It can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in your enterprise systems.

To get started, navigate to Amazon Q Business in the AWS Management Console. Find details in our technical documentation.

Amazon Q Business comes with a built-in user interface where users can ask complex questions in natural language, create or compare documents, generate document summaries, and interact with third-party applications. End users can engage with Amazon Q Business on public webpages, employee intranets, and embed in software application’s user interfaces.

Amazon Q Business supports access control for your data so that users have access to the right content based on their permissions. You can integrate your Amazon Q Business web experience with your external SAML 2.0–supported identity provider (such as Okta, Azure AD, and Ping Identity) to manage user authentication and authorization.

Learn more about connectors and supported permission types here.

Amazon Q Business provides administrators fine-grained security and configurable controls by managing enterprise access and access control list (ACL) permissions. When a user asks Amazon Q Business a question, it analyzes the data in the enterprise systems and generates responses only from the content that the user has access to. Q Business generates responses only from content that the user has access to based on our system's replicated access controls, which may be more restrictive than the original data source permissions.

Learn more about connectors and supported permission types here.

Administrators can configure Amazon Q Business to respond strictly from enterprise documents or allow it to use external knowledge to respond to queries when the answer is not available in enterprise documents. Administrators can also configure allowed and blocked topics as well as words. In addition, administrators can enable or disable the file upload feature for their end users.

Learn more about connectors and supported permission types here.

Amazon Q Business is optimized to respond in English. For more information on language support, see the documentation.

Please see the Amazon Q Business documentation for a full list of features available in each AWS Region.

For details, see AWS Services by Region.

Amazon Q Business provides plugins to interact with popular third-party applications, such as Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, PagerDuty, and more. Administrators can enable these plugins with a ready-to-use library of over 50 actions to their Amazon Q Business application. For more information, see the documentation.

Amazon Q Business automatically saves your conversation history for one month. Administrators have the ability to delete conversation history from the application.

Amazon Q Business integrates with a variety of databases, data warehouses, and data lakes through integration with Amazon QuickSight. This includes support for over 20 structured data sources, such as Amazon Redshift, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Oracle.

Amazon Q Business supports many common document types and formats, such as .PDF, .CSV, .DOCX, .HTML, .JSON, .PPT, audio, and video files. For a list of supported documents and file types, see the documentation.

No, however, AWS uses various foundation models from Amazon Bedrock within Amazon Q Business.

Amazon Q Business offers multiple prebuilt connectors that can connect to your data sources so that you can implement your generative AI solution with minimal configuration. Connectors offer modes for full synchronization or incremental data synchronization. To learn more, visit the Amazon Q Business Connectors page.

Yes. You can add custom connectors and then use the Amazon Q SDK to implement them.

Yes, you can use prebuilt and custom plugins to connect to any third-party application to enable searching of real-time data such as stock prices, employee vacation balances, package locations, and more.

You can securely connect your users to Amazon Q Business using either AWS IAM Identity Center or Identity Federation through IAM. To learn more, visit the documentation.

IAM Identity Center removes the administrative complexity of federating and managing permissions separately for each AWS account. You can set up AWS applications from a single interface and assign access to your cloud applications from a single place. IAM Identity Center also helps improve access visibility by integrating with AWS CloudTrail and providing a central place for you to audit single sign-on access to AWS accounts and SAML-enabled cloud applications, such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Box.

AWS IAM Identity Center is the recommended front door into AWS. It should be your primary tool to manage the AWS access of your workforce users. You can manage your identities in your preferred identity source, connect them once for use on AWS, and define fine-grained permissions and apply them consistently across accounts. As the number of your accounts scales, AWS IAM Identity Center gives you the option to use it as a single place to manage user access to all your cloud applications.

Amazon Q Business personalization capabilities are automatically enabled to use employee profile data from your organization’s identity provider that you have connected to AWS IAM Identity Center, with no additional setup needed, for contextual, more useful responses.

To get the most helpful and tailored answers from Amazon Q Business, please read our 'Quick guide to using Amazon Q Business.' The guide explains how to phrase questions clearly and provide necessary context.

Administrators can enable access to browser extensions for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox, and integrations with Slack, Microsoft Outlook and Word for Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams, to extend the capabilities of Amazon Q Business to third-party applications.

Yes, Amazon Q Business can surface answers from audio and video files, such as podcasts, music, advertisements, meeting recordings, video presentations, and more. For a list of supported media file types, see the documentation.

Yes, Amazon Q Business can surface answers from visual elements such as diagrams, info graphics, charts, and image-based content embedded within documents, including PDF, Microsoft PowerPoint and Word, and Google Docs and Presentations.

Yes, Amazon Q Business is a HIPAA eligible service, enabling healthcare and life sciences organizations to now use it to run sensitive workloads regulated under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Amazon Q Apps allows users to create custom apps powered by generative AI based on enterprise data in Amazon Q Business. Users can generate an app in a single step from conversations with Amazon Q Business, by describing app requirements in natural language, or by creating a copy from a shared app.

Yes, administrators can disable the ability for web experience users to create and run Amazon Q Apps through the Amazon Q Business application's feature settings in the Amazon Q console. Administrators can also remove published apps from the library.

Yes, Amazon Q Business already allows you to structure your responses based on user roles. It offers ACLs for user-level permissions on connected data sources and topic-level controls to block certain topics for specific user groups. This is consequently reflected in output of Amazon Q Apps. Amazon Q Apps also leverages the personalization capabilities available in Amazon Q Business.

Learn more about connectors and supported permission types here.

The Amazon Q Apps library includes a "like" button for users to endorse published apps they find useful. Users can utilize the thumbs up and thumbs down feature to provide feedback on the quality of the generated prompt created from the Amazon Q chat conversation, as well as the quality of the newly generated app created from the Amazon Q Apps Creator.

Amazon Q Apps inherits Amazon Q Business enterprise-grade security and access controls, enabling proper data access based on user permissions. It integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and IAM Federation for authentication, authorization, and simplification of access management. Administrators can entirely disable access to Amazon Q Apps, and can individually verify and remove published apps from the shared library, providing robust enterprise controls and compliance with organizational policies and regulations. Additionally, administrators can create app category labels to tailor the app library to specific requirements. App creators can enforce privacy by sharing apps with one or more users to limit the visibility and use of their apps.

Learn more about connectors and supported permission types here.

To get started with Amazon Q Apps, set up an Amazon Q Business web experience and ensure that Amazon Q Apps is enabled in your application settings. Once set up, users with access to the Amazon Q Business web application can access and create Amazon Q Apps within the deployed web experience. To learn more, visit the documentation.

Yes. Users can share apps with specific Amazon Q Business members or publish them in a shared library for all users within the same Amazon Q Business application environment. Published Amazon Q Apps are available for all authorized users to run as-is or customize to fit their specific needs.

All users of a given Amazon Q Business web experience will have access to published Amazon Q Apps. To restrict access to specific organizational units, you will need to create separate Amazon Q Business application environment.

Yes. You can bring the power of Amazon Q Apps into your tools of choice and enterprise applications through APIs that seamlessly allow you to create and consume Amazon Q Apps outputs. Learn more in the API integration guide.

Administrators can enable or disable the app creation and run features from the user access and subscription settings in the Amazon Q Business console.

Yes. Adding a form card to your Amazon Q app gives you the ability to collect user inputs. These apps allow app creators to collect user information that can later be used as a data source for generated outputs and further analysis.