Chicago Amazon Quick User Group meetup: Agentic AI and generative BI innovation at HERE Technologies

Meetup details: March 12, 2026 | Chicago, Illinois

Chicago’s Amazon Quick User Group brought together innovators from leading enterprises to explore how generative AI and agentic workflows are transforming business intelligence (BI). The event featured the “Insight Weaver” modernization journey from HERE Technologies, live demonstrations of voice-enabled AI with Amazon Nova Sonic from Wavicle Data Solutions, and a hands-on workflow automation workshop by Amazon Web Services (AWS) with support from West Loop Strategy.

The Chicago Amazon Quick User Group is a community of knowledge workers, data professionals, and business leaders from across the greater Chicago region. Members come together to explore how agentic AI and business intelligence are accelerating productivity and transforming the way people work, make decisions, and drive outcomes across their organizations. The group facilitates knowledge sharing and networking among Amazon Quick agentic AI practitioners, so members can exchange experiences and insights on these technologies.

In this post, we walk through the key highlights from the third Chicago Amazon Quick User Group meetup, including the HERE Technologies “Insight Weaver” modernization journey that consolidated 47 legacy dashboards into a unified environment, a live voice-enabled generative AI demonstration using Amazon Nova Sonic, and practical workflow automation patterns from Wavicle Data Solutions. Agentic AI enthusiasts came together for peer-to-peer learning, real-world customer stories, hands-on demonstrations, and cross-industry knowledge exchange. Attendees joined us from a range of industries, including location data and mapping, retail, Quick Service Restaurants (QSR), and technology consulting.

Figure 1: The speaker lineup for the Chicago Amazon Quick User Group meetup

Insight Weaver: modernizing HERE’s BI landscape with Amazon Quick

The first session opened with a customer success story from Naman Patel, Principal Cloud & Enterprise Architect at HERE Technologies, a global leader in location data and mapping technology. Naman shared the story of “Insight Weaver,” HERE’s initiative to modernize its BI landscape by harnessing the generative BI capabilities embedded in Amazon Quick.

The session highlighted the value of embedded Q&A capabilities that Quick offers to non-technical stakeholders. Business users across HERE Technologies can access data-driven insights without relying on technical teams, which reduced time-to-insight from 5 days to under 4 hours. Naman also walked attendees through how the Quick architecture scaled to support HERE’s enterprise data volumes, consolidating 47 legacy dashboards into a streamlined, unified environment. Perhaps most practically, the session addressed HERE’s approach to change management during the migration, a process completed in only 6 months. This use case offered a candid look at how the HERE team drove adoption across business units and brought non-technical stakeholders along on the journey.

What’s new with Amazon Quick

Kevin Carlson, Worldwide GTM Leader for Amazon Quick, brought attendees up to speed on the latest product innovations and roadmap direction for the platform. He outlined recent updates to the generative BI capabilities of Quick and its integration within the broader AWS data stack. He also described how Amazon Quick evolved from the natural language query capability that Amazon QuickSight introduced in 2020 to what is now much more than a generative BI assistant. Today, Quick is an AI-powered productivity platform. Quick connects to your applications, tools, and data, turning questions into answers, answers into actions, and actions into outcomes for individuals and entire teams. It combines agentic AI, automated workflows, deep research, and analytics into a single, trustworthy workspace.

Enterprise attendees were particularly engaged in discussions about the embedded analytics capabilities of the platform. They explored how knowledge workers across business functions, from operations and finance to marketing and supply chain, can use Quick to surface insights, automate routine workflows, and act on data without switching between tools. Kevin also touched on the broader role of Quick as an agentic AI workspace that extends well beyond business intelligence. Across the organization, knowledge workers can use it to conduct deep research, synthesize information from unstructured sources, build custom AI agents, and automate complex multi-step processes in plain language. The conversation reflected a broader shift in how organizations are thinking about AI: not as a standalone capability, but as an integrated layer that augments everyday decision-making and productivity across teams of all technical skill levels.

Figure 2: Attendees follow along during a session at the meetup

Voice-enabled generative AI demo: Amazon Nova Sonic and Amazon Quick

Duane Lyons, Practice Leader at Wavicle Data Solutions, and Anantha Choppalli, Chief Architect for the Amazon Web Services Practice at Wavicle delivered a live demonstration of voice-enabled generative AI using Amazon Nova Sonic, integrated with Quick.

Rather than relying on structured queries or manual dashboard navigation, business users can ask a question aloud and receive a real-time, data-backed answer. This saves the time typically spent pulling reports, waiting on analysts, or navigating complex dashboards. For knowledge workers who need fast answers to drive decisions, this kind of voice-driven interaction means insights are accessible in the moment they are needed, not hours or days later.

In this session, Duane also covered how AWS supports voice and generative AI by providing a complete multimodal AI stack, global low-latency infrastructure, and deep integration with enterprise data and applications. Voice and video data is protected with enterprise encryption and compliance.

Attendees engaged actively during the demonstration, with questions focused on deployment requirements, data connectivity, and the scope of voice interaction capabilities currently available on the platform.

Hands-on workshop: Automating workflows using Amazon Quick

Vaidy Janardhanam, Solutions Architect at AWS and Tarush Gupta, Technical Account Manager at AWS, conducted a practical hands-on workshop focused on the power of Amazon Quick Flows.

The session explored how Amazon Quick Flows can automate end-to-end business workflows by combining natural-language-driven automation with AI-powered reasoning and multi-step orchestration. Through a practical, hands-on format, Vaidy Janardhanam and Tarush Gupta guided participants in building intelligent workflows that transform routine tasks into automated sequences. Participants used natural-language prompts, configurable AI reasoning steps, UI-agent browser actions, and integrations with third-party applications. Attendees learned how Quick Flows can retrieve data, run actions across connected systems, and iteratively refine outputs through conversational adjustments. These flows demonstrated how organizations can streamline processes, reduce manual effort, and accelerate decision-making with the no-code automation capabilities of Quick.

Throughout the session, Ryan Monroe, Sr. Technical Account Manager at AWS, Giri Badanahatti, Senior Solution Architect at AWS, and Brett Hafstad, Data Engineer at West Loop Strategy, played a key role by supporting participants directly. They helped troubleshoot blockers, answered questions, and ensured everyone could successfully build and run their automated workflows.

Figure 3: Attendees collaborate during the hands-on workshop

Before the sessions began, participants had dedicated time to meet one another and connect with the organizing team. This gave professionals from different companies and industries a chance to identify potential collaborators.

The agenda also included an open forum for Q&A, where attendees were encouraged to direct questions to speakers and share their own experiences with the group. Following the formal program, several participants stayed to continue conversations with speakers and the organizing team, leading to further technical discussions and peer connection.

Across the sessions, attendees showed consistent interest in how they could apply the generative AI capabilities of Amazon Quick within their own organizations. The Nova Sonic voice AI demo and the “Insight Weaver” presentation generated notable engagement, and attendees responded to the practical, real-world nature of the applications on display.

Figure 4: Participants build automated workflows during the hands-on session

The embedded generative AI features of Amazon Quick mean organizations can create value with less specialized machine learning (ML) expertise. Attendees from across industries expressed interest in sandbox environments, workshop sessions, and proof-of-concept engagements. This interest reflected a community actively exploring how to apply these technologies in practice.

The Chicago Amazon Quick User Group will hold its next meetup on August 4, 2026, at Amazon, 227 West Monroe Street, Chicago, IL. Register today! Whether you work in data, AI, or business intelligence, lead a team that depends on timely insights, or are simply curious about how generative and agentic AI are reshaping the way people work, the Chicago Amazon Quick User Group is a practical place to learn, connect, and stay ahead.

Stay connected

Join the Chicago Amazon Quick LinkedIn Group to stay informed on upcoming events, product announcements, and peer discussions within the Amazon Quick ecosystem.

Connect with Chicago practitioners, share use cases, and stay updated on upcoming meetups.

Not in Chicago? Learn about user groups in your area! Or let us know if you want to start a user group!

Figure 5: Organizers and speakers at the Chicago Amazon Quick User Group meetup

Also, check out the broader Amazon Quick Community. It’s the official one-stop shop for your Quick learning path, with tens of thousands of members, over 600 learning resources, free live online sessions nearly every week, and Quick experts and solution architects ready to answer your questions. As Sr. Amazon Quick Community Manager Kristin Mandia stated: “The Quick Community is about learning together and building connections. It’s where users at any skill level can find help, learn something new, and meet others.”

We look forward to continuing these conversations at the August 4, 2026, meetup.

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