Amazon Q is now generally available in Amazon QuickSight, bringing Generative BI capabilities to the entire organization

We’re excited to announce that Amazon Q in QuickSight, previously announced in preview at AWS re:Invent 2023, is now generally available, bringing Generative BI capabilities to all Amazon QuickSight user roles.

Organizations have amassed massive amounts of data, and customers we talk with are looking for faster ways to put that data to work informing everyday business decisions. That’s why we created QuickSight to be a unified BI service to fill all your BI needs with interactive dashboards, paginated reports, embedded analytics, and our natural language add-on capability QuickSight Q for business users to ask and answer questions of data not answered by their dashboards. Amazon Q has been using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to understand business user language and map it to data queries since its launch in 2021. In 2022, we added advanced statistical modeling capabilities, including the ability to ask for a “forecast” or ask “why” to see contributing factors to changes in metrics. Now, large language models (LLMs) like those available through Amazon Bedrock bring deeper language understanding capabilities and broad world knowledge, enabling us to rethink traditional ways of work. Amazon Q in QuickSight is the generative AI-enhanced upgrade of the previous QuickSight Q, bringing together the generative AI strengths of LLMs from Amazon Bedrock with the proven models from QuickSight to create Generative BI experiences, democratizing access to data insights and accelerating data analysis.

With today’s launch, Amazon Q in QuickSight expands Generative BI capabilities to QuickSight Enterprise Edition through updates to existing Reader and Author roles and by adding new Reader Pro and Author Pro roles. Data Q&A, previously only available to users in Enterprise Edition accounts subscribed to the Q add-on, is now available to all Enterprise Edition user roles, allowing the entire organization to confidently answer questions of data not answered by their dashboards through a new multi-visual Q&A experience bringing added context and insights. New Story and Executive Summary capabilities are available through new Reader Pro and Author Pro roles. Stories enable business users to use Amazon Q to create complete documents and presentations with compelling narratives and visuals to explain their data, including ideas for how to improve the business, and Executive Summaries provide them instant access to key trends and changes in their dashboards using natural language. Author Pro roles also get access to a new natural language dashboard authoring experience, enabling business analysts to quickly build dashboards. Additionally, the ability to create Topics used to enable Q&A over specific data moves into the Author Pro role, allowing you to selectively grant that capability to individual users instead of the previous behavior with the Amazon Q add-on, where you paid for every Author role within the account to have the ability to create Topics.

Let’s look at some of the highlights of this launch.

Get contextual answers with multi-visual Q&A

Research and feedback from customers revealed three common problems business users face when using previous generation single question to single answer style natural language query (NLQ) systems. First, these users frequently don’t know the necessary phrasing to get needed answers or specific values of data that can be queried. Second, they are frequently skeptical about the accuracy of answers because a single visual answer lacks the context to fully understand scope of data included. Third, they frequently use vague language that doesn’t fully specify all information needed to create a precise data query, resulting in a failure to produce answers or answers mismatched to their intentions.

To address these problems, the new Q&A experience first suggests AI-generated questions and provides data previews for a quick understanding of what’s in the data to help you see how to phrase questions and what types of answers a specific Topic can give. Next, the answers contain multiple visuals presenting related data, bringing additional context to build confidence and understanding in data. Finally, you can now ask vague questions like “What are the best products” or even very simple single-value queries like a single customer or product name, and Amazon Q will bring back data it can find related to your question, including alternative suggestions if multiple parts of data match the request.

Use Generative BI to create compelling stories

With Stories, Reader Pro and Author Pro users can ask Amazon Q to build simple-to-share documents or presentations with simple natural language prompts, saving time ideating on how to present insights to stakeholders to inform team decisions. You simply select specific visuals you want to examine, describe an overall narrative (for example, “examine current sales performance calling out key products and customers, and suggest strategies to grow sales next year”), and Amazon Q creates a draft story explaining findings from data and making recommendations about how to grow the business. You can customize your story with additional visuals, text, images, and themes, and use Amazon Q to summarize or rewrite text to get a refined document that’s ready to share.

Get instant insights with Executive Summaries

Reader Pro and Author Pro users viewing a dashboard can simply choose the new Amazon Q Build menu to instantly generate an executive summary comparing trends and changes in data to quickly understand business performance and identify potential areas of further investigation.

Build dashboards fast using natural language

Author Pro users building dashboards can save time and reduce clicks by asking Amazon Q to build visuals, build calculations, and refine visuals using natural language. You can create visuals and modify them by describing the outcome needed using natural language, which saves time applying filters and aggregations, defining complex scenarios like comparisons or forecasts, and applying multi-step formatting actions like conditional formats. Natural language calculation generation helps reduce time spent looking up specific syntax and typing complex expressions.

Bring Generative BI to apps by embedding multi-visual Q&A

Developers can now seamlessly embed the new multi-visual Q&A experience in their apps to quickly add advanced generative AI capabilities without needing to learn special skills, train models, or deploy resources. The experience can be embedded with just a few lines of code using the QuickSight SDK, and the experience can be customized with varying size, ingress, and theme colors to match an app’s brand and function.

Customer stories

Customers are using Amazon Q in QuickSight around the world to help across a wide variety of industries including financial services, retail, government, manufacturing, biotech, education, healthcare, technology, consulting, transportation, and food services in a broad number of use cases from sales, service, marketing, engineering, banking, fraud detection, logistics, learning management and more. Continue reading for a couple examples.

We’re proud to have Anthology as a launch partner embedding the new Amazon Q in QuickSight multi-visual Q&A experience in their popular Illuminate software used by higher-ed institutions around the world to deliver great learning outcomes.

“With Anthology Illuminate, our goal is to truly democratize institutional decision-making for educational institutions, putting insight directly into the hands of the person best placed to act upon it, without relying on an intermediary expert. By embedding Amazon Q in QuickSight into Anthology Illuminate we can provide access to integrated, campus-wide data reporting and visualization into an institution’s common workflows. QuickSight’s newest Generative BI capabilities bring more comprehensive self-serve analytics to institutional decision-makers regardless of their data skills.”

– Steve Bailey, Director of Product Management, Analytics.

Learn more about how Anthology uses embedded analytics offered by Amazon QuickSight to democratize decision making for higher education.

Traeger Grills, provider of smokers, grills, and barbeque products providing outstanding meals and gracing countless back yards, uses Amazon Q in QuickSight to empower their Customer Experience team to get data insights needed to create outstanding experiences for their customers.

“Our business is constantly evolving and developing new data needs, which led us to create and update dashboards and reports. QuickSight enables our operations teams to deliver data to users across a variety of use cases, from distribution-center forecasts to reporting Amazon Connect call-center metrics. QuickSight Q has shown us the power of natural-language experiences to accelerate data work by helping our business users get insights instantly. We are excited to see the additional Generative BI capabilities for authors because they can raise our speed to respond to these changing business needs to a new level. Natural-language experiences like these are fundamentally changing the way people work.”

– Corey Savory-Venzke, Vice President of Customer Experience at Traeger Grills.

Learn more about how Traeger Grills’s Customer Experience team drives customer satisfaction significantly using Amazon QuickSight.

BMW Group, global manufacturer of premium automobiles and motorcycles, uses Amazon Q in QuickSight to accelerate dashboard creation delivering fast response time for stakeholders to get data they need to keep the business rolling.

“Here at BMW, our regional specialists are focused on optimizing inventory throughout our supply chain. They get regular requests from stakeholders like our board members or supply chain specialists to create new dashboard views for them to analyze the latest trends. QuickSight’s new Q-powered authoring experience is a huge time saver to create calculations without stopping for reference, build visuals fast, and then refine the visual presentation for a precise experience, all with natural language. The regional specialists can impress our business users with a quick turnaround and they can make critical decisions more quickly.”

– Christoph Albrecht, data engineering and analytics expert at BMW Group.

Showpad, a leading provider of sales enablement solutions, has been an excellent partner working closely with our team to help develop an experience that seamlessly integrates Amazon Q in QuickSight directly into their application to provide Q&A capabilities for end users to quickly and easily get content analytics.

“At Showpad, we wanted to give users more ways to discover and explore data while keeping the user experience simple and intuitive. With Amazon Q in Quicksight, we’re able to give our customers the ability to query data without the need for a complex user interface or the need to know SQL. Integration to our app took just a little over a week, and we were able to customize the experience so it blends seamlessly into our experience. We’re already hearing from customers thrilled with this new experience and are looking ahead to additional Q capabilities we’ll be able to add in the future.”

– Jeroen Minnaert, Chief Architect and Head of Data at Showpad.

Feature availability

With this launch, we are simplifying QuickSight Enterprise Edition pricing, with Readers and Authors now priced at fixed, a predictable $3 per user per month, and $24 per user per month, respectively, including access to Q&A capabilities. Story generation and executive summaries are available at $20 per user per month for Reader Pro, and $50 per user per month for Author Pro roles. Author Pro roles also get access to the new Amazon Q dashboard authoring experience and can create and manage Topics, enabling Q&A on specific data. Users can be added or removed, moved back and forth from Author Pro to Author, and Reader Pro to Reader, or upgraded from Reader to Author or Author Pro at any time, making it straightforward to pay only for the capabilities you need. To learn more, see Amazon Q in QuickSight brings new user roles and pricing to Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition.

Amazon Q in QuickSight is available in US East (Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt) AWS Regions at launch, with plans to expand to all current QuickSight Q Regions.

Amazon Q in QuickSight is not trained on customer data, and its governance and data security features meet the most stringent requirements for enterprise and government customers.  Get started with a free 30 day trial of QuickSight today.

About the authors

Zac Woodall is Principal Product Manager of AIML at Amazon QuickSight. As the product leader for AIML capabilities in Amazon QuickSight, Zac applies AI to simplify product experiences making data more useful and accessible. Zac has 24 years of experience helping create some of the world’s most used enterprise and consumer software, with stints in startups, Tableau, and Microsoft before coming to AWS.</p

Heather Hughes is a senior product marking manager for Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Web Service’s cloud-native, fully managed BI service.