How Amazon Q Business works

With Amazon Q Business, you can build an interactive chat application for your organization’s end users, using a combination of your enterprise data and large language model knowledge, or enterprise data only. The following sections outline how Amazon Q works.

Admin workflow

As an admin user using IAM Identity Center for user management—including integrating an external identity provider to manage user access through IAM Identity Center—you create and configure an Amazon Q Business application by completing the following steps:

1. Configuring an IAM Identity Center instance for your Amazon Q Business application with users and groups added. Amazon Q Business supports both organization and account level IAM Identity Center instances. Your IAM Identity Center instance must be created in a region supported by Amazon Q Business. For more information on region support, see Supported regions.

2. (Optional) Creating a sample Amazon Q Business application to test how Amazon Q Business works before creating a fully-configured application.

3. Creating a fully-configured Amazon Q Business application that powers your web experience, connected to IAM Identity Center.

   Note

   If you use the console to create an application, Amazon Q Business automaticaly creates a web experience for you. If you use the API, you have to create a web experience for your application.

4. Choosing a retriever and index type for the application.

5. (Optional) Connecting any data sources to—or directly uploading data into—the application.

6. Adding groups and users who will access the Amazon Q Business web experience, and provisioning user subscriptions . An application will be created even if you don't add users to it, but an application needs to have a subscribed user to work.

7. Enhancing the web experience by configuring admin-level controls, tuning chat relevance, plugins, and chat features (including Amazon Q Apps) for end users. For more information, see Enhancing an Amazon Q Business application and Amazon Q Business features.

8. Optionally, customizing your web experience to test how it looks for your end users. In this step, you add a title and subtitle for your web experience, a welcome message, and quick prompts for your end users. You can't chat with—or test—the application in customize mode.

9. Then, share the web experience URL generated by Amazon Q Business with the end users you've subscribed so that they can log in and begin chatting.

User workflow

If you're an end user using your organization's Amazon Q Business web experience, you perform the following steps:

1. Navigate to your organization's Amazon Q Business web experience URL, and sign in with your credentials.

2. Start chatting and ask questions of your organization's Amazon Q Business web experience. You can, for example choose from the following options:

   • Ask questions – Ask a question. Amazon Q Business generates and returns answers based on the enterprise data that the end user has access to. Continue the conversation by asking follow-up questions.

   • Verify response sources – Each Amazon Q Business answer cites the source documents used to generate it.

   • See conversation history – Amazon Q Business retains conversation history for 30 days so that they can search through questions and answers. You can view conversation history from the left navigation pane.

   • Summarize content – Amazon Q Business can summarize email message threads.

   • Create outlines and drafts – Use Amazon Q Business to create outlines and templates for documents.

   • Perform plugin actions – If you've configured Plugins, ask Amazon Q Business to perform actions on your behalf, like creating a ticket in a supported third party app.

   • Test guardrails and chat controls – If you've configured Guardrails and chat controls, check how Amazon Q Business responds to queries and special topics.

   • Additionally, you can ask Amazon Q Business to complete any supported follow-up tasks—like creating task-focused Amazon Q Apps—that your admin has enabled for your application.

   For a list of web experience capabilities, see Using an Amazon Q web experience.

3. Sometimes your question requires information that's beyond the scope of your enterprise data. Then, Amazon Q Business responds that it couldn't find an answer in your documents, unless your admin has allowed Amazon Q Business to generate responses using model knowledge.

Amazon Q Business stores conversation history for 30 days and maintains conversation context after a conversation ends. Conversations can be resumed from where you left off within this 30-day period.

Amazon Q Business workflow

In response to an end user query during a web experience chat, Amazon Q Business does the following:

1. Uses the retriever chosen by the admin to select and retrieve documents that are relevant to the query, following authorization and access control.

2. Generates a response to the user query using either a combination of retrieved enterprise data and model knowledge, or only enterprise data, depending on admin configuration.

3. Returns the generated response to the end user. Amazon Q Business assigns a unique message ID to each answer for tracking purposes.

The following diagram shows you how Amazon Q Business responds to chat requests: