- Amazon plans to integrate its AI chatbot Q with Microsoft’s Office 365 service.
- The integration aims to expand Q’s user base by leveraging the popularity of Office 365.
To reach real scale in AI, you sometimes have to enter enemy territory. That’s what Amazon is about to do with its Q AI assistant.
The cloud giant plans to integrate Q with Office 365, the work productivity software service run by arch rival Microsoft.
Amazon is looking to launch a new Q add-in for Office 365, according to a recent internal document obtained by Business Insider. Add-ins are extra programs that provide new features and capabilities to existing software.
With this new add-in, Office 365 users will be able to directly access Q within Microsoft applications such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, the document explained. At the moment, most Q users access the Amazon AI chatbot through AWS’s website.
The move is part of a broader set of new Q features that Amazon is working on, including a new browser extension, the document stated.
It’s unclear when the new features will be announced. Amazon is hosting its annual re:Invent cloud conference in early December and often readies product updates and launches for this event.
The new integration could potentially expand Q’s user base because Microsoft’s 365 service is one of the most popular productivity software suites in the world. Many business applications, such as Salesforce’s CRM software, have their own Office add-ins that help users access these services directly from within Microsoft’s platform.
“We are inspired by how creatively customers are using Amazon Q to enhance productivity, and we will continue to build innovative new features to unlock new capabilities and make it even more useful for customers,” AWS’s spokesperson Patrick Neighorn told BI in a statement.
Q publicly launched in April and was recently named one of the leading AI code assistants by research firm Gartner.
Getting availability on other enterprise platforms may be a natural next step of growth for Q, which targets business customers. Amazon employees previously told BI that the company “rushed” Q’s launch last year. In August, some Amazon employees raised concerns about Q’s lack of features that they said was causing more customers to use Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant instead, BI previously reported.
AWS CEO Matt Garman shared on Linkedin last week that Amazon Q is now linked to millions of internal documents and integrated with tools his teams use every day. This year alone, he said, Amazon Q has “resolved over 1 million internal Amazon developer questions,” saving more than 450,000 hours of work.
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