How Amazon Q Business works

With Amazon Q Business, you can build an interactive chat application environment 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

Amazon Q Business uses AWS IAM Identity Center to connect to your workforce users. Identity Federation through IAM is also supported, with the limitations described below. If you're an admin user configuring an Amazon Q Business application, your application creation process depends on whether you're using IAM Identity Center or AWS Identity and Access Management for end user access management.

If IAM Identity Center is already enabled in your organization, Amazon Q Business will automatically identify it and allow you to connect to it. IAM Identity Center will enable you to manage access based on the users and groups in your corporate directory. It will provide you with accurate billing for the subscriptions of your users and will ensure that your configuration can support the future growth of your Amazon Q Business use cases.

If IAM Identity Center is not yet enabled, we strongly recommend that you work with your AWS Administrator to enable an organization instance of IAM Identity Center. This will give your AWS Administrator the most control over the configuration. It will ensure accurate billing for the subscriptions of your users. It will also give you the most flexibility to grow Amazon Q Business use cases, spanning multiple AWS accounts, users, and integrations with other AWS applications. If your AWS Administrator cannot enable an organization instance of IAM Identity Center, you can enable an account instance of IAM Identity Center by yourself through the Amazon Q Business console. Your deployment of Amazon Q Business, and its integration with other AWS applications, will be limited to the AWS Region and AWS account where the IAM Identity Center account instance is enabled.

Note

If you have Amazon Q Business deployments with account instances of IAM Identity Center in multiple AWS accounts, you will be billed separately for user subscriptions per AWS account. For more information, see Understanding user subscriptions.

If you cannot use any IAM Identity Center option, you can still set up Amazon Q Business using IAM Federation through OIDC (preferred) or SAML. This approach will give your users access to Amazon Q Business capabilities, but will limit your ability to scale Amazon Q use cases via integration with other AWS applications.

Note

If you have Amazon Q Business deployments with IAM federation to multiple AWS accounts, you will be billed separately for user subscriptions per AWS account. For more information, see Understanding user subscriptions.

The following section outlines the admin workflow for creating applications with IAM Identity Center and Identity Federation through IAM.

Topics

• Admin workflow for apps using AWS IAM Identity Center
• Admin workflow for apps using Identity Federation through IAM

Admin workflow for apps using AWS IAM Identity Center

Amazon Q Business supports managing end user access to applications using AWS IAM Identity Center. When you use AWS IAM Identity Center to manage users, you sync user identies into IAM Identity Center and connect your Amazon Q Business to IAM Identity Center to manage user access.

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 environment by completing the following steps:

1. Enabling an IAM Identity Center instance and connecting the identity source for your Amazon Q Business application environment in IAM Identity Center. Amazon Q Business supports both organization and account level IAM Identity Center instances.

2. Connecting an IAM Identity Center instance for your Amazon Q Business application environment with users and groups added.

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

4. 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 environment, Amazon Q Business automatically creates a web experience for you. If you use the API, you have to create a web experience for your application environment.

5. Choosing a retriever and index type for the application environment.

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

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

   Important

   Only an admin can create and upgrade user subscriptions.

8. 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 environment and Amazon Q Business features.

9. 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 environment in customize mode.

10. 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.

Admin workflow for apps using Identity Federation through IAM

Amazon Q Business supports managing end user access to applications using Identity Federation through IAM. When you use IAM Identity Federation to manage users, your application derives user identities directly from your identity provider. As an admin, you create and configure a Amazon Q Business application environment using IAM Identity Federation by completing the following steps:

1. Configuring your external identity provider and connecting it to an AWS Identity and Access Management identity provider instance.

2. Creating a fully-configured Amazon Q Business application that powers your web experience, connected to your identity provider through IAM.

3. Choosing a retriever and index type for the application environment.

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

5. Managing access for end users by adding subscriptions and creating a Amazon Q Business web experience.

6. 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 environment and Amazon Q Business features.

7. 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 environment in customize mode.

8. Then, sharing either your own custom web application URL or 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 environment.

   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: