Amazon Q Business heads to Australia through Ingram Micro

Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) enterprise grade generative artificial intelligence-powered assistant will now be available in Australia through Ingram Micro after it was originally released globally in April 2024.

As an AI-powered assistant, Amazon Q Business finds information, gains insight and takes action at work will also be available through AWS Sydney Region. According to AWS, it “empowers employees to be more data-driven, generate content and make better, faster decisions using company knowledge and data”.

Announced during AWS Partner Summit held in Sydney on 2 April, Amazon Q Business will be available to customers and partners using cross-region inference profiles. Cross-region inference automatically routes inference requests to the optimal AWS Region, prioritising the source region to minimise latency and enhance user experience.

This approach helps to ensure “continuous performance for customers and partners even during peak demand periods”, explained AWS. The cloud giant also claims it is cost-effective as charges are only incurred on the source region of the request, with no routing costs.

Customers with data residency preferences can opt to run and store Amazon Q Business workloads exclusively within the AWS Sydney Region.  

Employees at companies of all sizes and across industries spend considerable time on repetitive tasks, like searching through fragmented data sources to find the information they need, which prevents them from focusing on bigger or more complex priorities, claimed AWS.

Ingram Micro Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) senior general manager for cloud Phil Duke said the technology distributor and solutions aggregator will make Amazon Q available to its vast network of partners across the region.

“We believe that AI-powered apps and solutions can enable our channel partners to boost their operational efficiency and deliver enhanced value to their customers,” he said. “Amazon Q Business has potential to help our partners streamline their workflows, improve decision-making processes and reduce time spent on routine tasks.

“With Amazon Q Business AI apps our partners will be able to create customised solutions which in turn may help them address specific business challenges and scale their operations effectively.”

According to Duke, as organisations continue to embrace AI-driven digital transformation, Ingram Micro is committed to bringing solutions like Amazon Q to its partners.

That is why AWS created Amazon Q Business, which makes generative AI accessible to every employee within an organisation. Q Business uses enterprise access controls to ensure users access content securely, according to their permissions.

As such, employees can receive quick, accurate and relevant answers to questions based on their organisation’s data, with citations and references to the source material for increased transparency.  

Employees can also use Amazon Q Business to generate content with support for details like embedded images, scanned PDFs and even tabular search on small tables. Additionally, the assistant connects to over 40 enterprise systems, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Microsoft 365 and Salesforce. 

AWS A/NZ director of solutions architecture Nam Je Cho said Amazon Q Business represents a “fundamental shift” in workplace productivity, providing secure, comprehensive answers with citations and intelligent document summarisation.

“Teams can now access and analyse information faster than ever before, enabling data-driven decisions that drive business value,” he said. “From streamlining customer service to accelerating research and development, Amazon Q Business helps organisations optimise their processes while maintaining enterprise-grade security.” 

Amazon Q Business is already optimising productivity in the workplace, from financial institutions streamlining risk assessment documentation, to healthcare providers accelerating patient care coordination, to HR teams helping employees more easily navigate their benefit programs.

The assistant is also helping employees across Amazon work more efficiently, including generating more than 100,000 account summaries for the AWS sales team and reducing the time developers spend churning on technical investigations by more than 450,000 hours, the cloud giant claimed.  

This includes customers and partners in Australia like Arcanum AI.

“Implementing enterprise-grade generative AI may seem out of reach for small and medium-sized businesses,” Arcanum AI CEO Asa Cox said. “We’ve transformed this perception by helping companies across manufacturing, construction and professional services modernise their operations with Amazon Q Business.

“Its ability to automate manual processes while maintaining security and compliance delivers significant productivity gains and often saving hours of manual work daily.”

Cox said customers are growing twice as fast without adding headcount, cutting quote times in half to win 25 per cent more deals and reducing report generation from two weeks to just two days.

“Our remote deployment model ensures quick implementation, and as we expand our industry connectors and AI assistant libraries, we’re positioned to help even more businesses transform their operations through accessible, practical generative AI solutions,” he said.

AWS has a long-term commitment to boosting the digital economy in Australia, with investments of about $9.1 billion in the country since the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in 2012.

It launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region in 2023 and also announced planned to invest more than $13.2 billion in local infrastructure, supporting more than 11,000 jobs annually by 2027.

These investments will accelerate innovation and drive economic growth and are estimated to contribute $35 billion to Australia’s gross domestic product by 2027.  

According to AWS it has trained more than 400,000 people with cloud skills in Australia.

Partners interest in learning more about using Amazon Q and Q Business can access four free courses adapted to all levels of technical experience.