Ep062: Amazon Q - Your Generative AI Assistant with Urmila Kukreja of Smartsheet

Urmila Kukreja of Smartsheet and Nick Simha of AWS discuss leveraging Amazon Q’s Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solution to enhance productivity by enabling employees to quickly access relevant information within secure, integrated workflows like Slack, improving efficiency across the organization.

Topics Include:

• Introduction by Nick Simha, AWS.
• Overview of Amazon Q’s role in data analytics and Gen AI.
• Gen AI’s impact on productivity, ~30% improvement backed by Gartner study findings.
• General productivity improvement seen across various departments.
• Amazon Q’s developer code generation tool – rapid development
• Gen AI and LLMs’ challenges: security, privacy, and data relevance.
• Foundation models lack specific organizational knowledge by default.
• Empowering Gen AI to grant system access can cause issues
• Privacy concern: Sensitive data, like credit card info, can be central in data breaches
• Compliance is critical for organizational reputation and data integrity.
• Data integration techniques: prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, custom training.
• RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) balances cost and accuracy effectively.
• Implementing RAG requires complex, resource-heavy integration steps.
• Amazon Q simplifies RAG integration with "RAG as a service."
• Amazon Q’s Gen AI stack overview, including Bedrock and model flexibility.
• Amazon Q connects to 40+ applications, including Salesforce and ServiceNow.
• Amazon Q respects existing security rules and data privacy constraints.
• Plugin functionality enables backend actions directly from Amazon Q.
• All configurations and permissions can be managed by administrators.
• Urmila Kukreja from Smartsheet explains real-world Q implementation.
• Smartsheet’s Ask Us Engineering Slack channel: origin of Q integration.
• Q integration in Slack simplifies data access and user workflow.
• "Ask Me" Slack bot lets employees query databases instantly.
• Adoption across departments is high due to integrated workflow.
• Future plans include adding data sources and personalized response features.
• Session wrap up

Participants:

• Urmila Kukreja – Director of Product Management, Smartsheet
• Nick Simha - Solutions Architecture Leader - Data, Analytics, GenAI and Emerging ISVs, AWS

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon.com/isv/