Exclusive: Amazon's AI chatbot Q is entering enemy turf by integrating with Microsoft's Office 365
NEWS | 19 November 2024
Amazon plans to integrate its AI chatbot Q with Microsoft's Office 365 service. The integration aims to expand Q's user base by leveraging the popularity of Office 365. Amazon Q, launched in April, faces competition from Microsoft's own Copilot AI assistant. To reach real scale in AI, you sometimes have to enter enemy territory. That's what Amazon is about to do with its Q AI assistant. The cloud giant plans to integrate Q with Office 365, the work productivity software service run by its archrival Microsoft. Amazon is looking to launch a Q add-in for Office 365, according to a recent internal document obtained by Business Insider. Add-ins are extra programs that provide new features and capabilities for existing software. With this add-in, Office 365 users would be able to directly access Q within Microsoft applications such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, the document said. At the moment, most Q users access the Amazon AI chatbot through its website, or messaging apps like Slack and Teams. It's part of a set of new Q features Amazon is working on, including a browser extension, the document said. It's unclear when the new features will be announced. Amazon is hosting its annual Re:Invent cloud conference in early December, and it often readies product updates and launches for this event. The new integration could expand Q's user base because Microsoft's 365's service is one of the most popular productivity-software suites. Many business applications, such as Salesforce's customer-relationship-management software, have their own Office add-ins that help users access these services directly from within Microsoft's platform. "We are inspired by how creatively customers are using Amazon Q to enhance productivity, and we will continue to build innovative new features to unlock new capabilities and make it even more useful for customers," an AWS spokesperson, Patrick Neighorn, told BI in a statement. Q publicly launched in April. The research firm Gartner recently named it one of the leading AI code assistants. Getting availability on other enterprise platforms may be a natural next step for Q, which targets business customers. Amazon employees previously told BI that the company rushed Q's launch. In August, some Amazon employees raised concerns about Q's lack of features, arguing that it was causing more customers to use Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant instead. AWS's CEO, Matt Garman, said on LinkedIn last week that Amazon Q was linked to millions of internal documents and integrated with tools his teams use every day. This year alone, he said, Amazon Q has "resolved over 1 million internal Amazon developer questions," saving more than 450,000 hours of work. Do you work at Amazon? Got a tip?
Author: Eugene Kim.
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