How AWS sales uses Amazon Q Business for customer engagement

Earlier this year, we published the first in a series of posts about how AWS is transforming our seller and customer journeys using generative AI. In addition to planning considerations when building an AI application from the ground up, it focused on our Account Summaries use case, which allows account teams to quickly understand the state of a customer account, including recent trends in service usage, opportunity pipeline, and recommendations to help customers maximize the value they receive from AWS.

In the same spirit of using generative AI to equip our sales teams to most effectively meet customer needs, this post reviews how we’ve delivered an internally-facing conversational sales assistant using Amazon Q Business. We discuss how our sales teams are using it today, compare the benefits of Amazon Q Business as a managed service to the do-it-yourself option, review the data sources available and high-level technical design, and talk about some of our future plans.

Introducing Field Advisor

In April 2024, we launched our AI sales assistant, which we call Field Advisor, making it available to AWS employees in the Sales, Marketing, and Global Services organization, powered by Amazon Q Business. Since that time, thousands of active users have asked hundreds of thousands of questions through Field Advisor, which we have embedded in our customer relationship management (CRM) system, as well as through a Slack application. The following screenshot shows an example of an interaction with Field Advisor.

Field Advisor serves four primary use cases:

• AWS-specific knowledge search – With Amazon Q Business, we’ve made internal data sources as well as public AWS content available in Field Advisor’s index. This enables sales teams to interact with our internal sales enablement collateral, including sales plays and first-call decks, as well as customer references, customer- and field-facing incentive programs, and content on the AWS website, including blog posts and service documentation.
• Document upload – When users need to provide context of their own, the chatbot supports uploading multiple documents during a conversation. We’ve seen our sales teams use this capability to do things like consolidate meeting notes from multiple team members, analyze business reports, and develop account strategies. For example, an account manager can upload a document representing their customer’s account plan, and use the assistant to help identify new opportunities with the customer.
• General productivity – Amazon Q Business specializes in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) over enterprise and domain-specific datasets, and can also perform general knowledge retrieval and content generation tasks. Our sales, marketing, and operations teams use Field Advisor to brainstorm new ideas, as well as generate personalized outreach that they can use with their customers and stakeholders.
• Notifications and recommendations – To complement the conversational capabilities provided by Amazon Q, we’ve built a mechanism that allows us to deliver alerts, notifications, and recommendations to our field team members. These push-based notifications are available in our assistant’s Slack application, and we’re planning to make them available in our web experience as well. Example notifications we deliver include field-wide alerts in support of AWS summits like AWS re:Invent, reminders to generate an account summary when there’s an upcoming customer meeting, AI-driven insights around customer service usage and business data, and cutting-edge use cases like autonomous prospecting, which we’ll talk more about in an upcoming post.

Based on an internal survey, our field teams estimate that roughly a third of their time is spent preparing for their customer conversations, and another 20% (or more) is spent on administrative tasks. This time adds up individually, but also collectively at the team and organizational level. Using our AI assistant built on Amazon Q, team members are saving hours of time each week. Not only that, but our sales teams devise action plans that they otherwise might have missed without AI assistance.

Here’s a sampling of what some of our more active users had to say about their experience with Field Advisor:

“I use Field Advisor to review executive briefing documents, summarize meetings and outline actions, as well analyze dense information into key points with prompts. Field Advisor continues to enable me to work smarter, not harder.”– Sales Director

“When I prepare for onsite customer meetings, I define which advisory packages to offer to the customer. We work backward from the customer’s business objectives, so I download an annual report from the customer website, upload it in Field Advisor, ask about the key business and tech objectives, and get a lot of valuable insights. I then use Field Advisor to brainstorm ideas on how to best position AWS services. Summarizing the business objectives alone saves me between 4–8 hours per customer, and we have around five customer meetings to prepare for per team member per month.” – AWS Professional Services, EMEA

“I benefit from getting notifications through Field Advisor that I would otherwise not be aware of. My customer’s Savings Plans were expiring, and the notification helped me kick off a conversation with them at the right time. I asked Field Advisor to improve the content and message of an email I needed to send their executive team, and it only took me a minute. Thank you!” – Startup Account Manager, North America

Amazon Q Business underpins this experience, reducing the time and effort it takes for internal teams to have productive conversations with their customers that drive them toward the best possible outcomes on AWS.

The rest of this post explores how we’ve built our AI assistant for sales teams using Amazon Q Business, and highlights some of our future plans.

Putting Amazon Q Business into action

We started our journey in building this sales assistant before Amazon Q Business was available as a fully managed service. AWS provides the primitives needed for building new generative AI applications from the ground up: services like Amazon Bedrock to provide access to several leading foundation models, several managed vector database options for semantic search, and patterns for using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as a data lake to host knowledge bases that can be used for RAG. This approach works well for teams like ours with builders experienced in these technologies, as well as for teams who need deep control over every component of the tech stack to meet their business objectives.

When Amazon Q Business became generally available in April 2024, we quickly saw an opportunity to simplify our architecture, because the service was designed to meet the needs of our use case—to provide a conversational assistant that could tap into our vast (sales) domain-specific knowledge bases. By moving our core infrastructure to Amazon Q, we no longer needed to choose a large language model (LLM) and optimize our use of it, manage Amazon Bedrock agents, a vector database and semantic search implementation, or custom pipelines for data ingestion and management. In just a few weeks, we were able to cut over to Amazon Q and significantly reduce the complexity of our service architecture and operations. Not only that, we expected this move to pay dividends—and it has—as the Amazon Q Business service team has continued to add new features (like automatic personalization) and enhance performance and result accuracy.

The following diagram illustrates Field Advisor’s high-level architecture:

Solution overview

We built Field Advisor using the built-in capabilities of Amazon Q Business. This includes how we configured data sources that comprise our knowledge base, indexing documents and relevancy tuning, security (authentication, authorization, and guardrails), and Amazon Q’s APIs for conversation management and custom plugins. We deliver our chatbot experience through a custom web frontend, as well as through a Slack application.

Data management

As mentioned earlier in this post, our initial knowledge base is comprised of all of our internal sales enablement materials, as well as publicly available content including the AWS website, blog posts, and service documentation. Amazon Q Business provides a number of out-of-the-box connectors to popular data sources like relational databases, content management systems, and collaboration tools. In our case, where we have several applications built in-house, as well as third-party software backed by Amazon S3, we make heavy use of Amazon Q connector for Amazon S3, and as well as custom connectors we’ve written. Using the service’s built-in source connectors standardizes and simplifies the work needed to maintain data quality and manage the overall data lifecycle. Amazon Q gives us a templatized way to filter source documents when generating responses on a particular topic, making it straightforward for the application to produce a higher quality response. Not only that, but each time Amazon Q provides an answer using the knowledge base we’ve connected, it automatically cites sources, enabling our sellers to verify authenticity in the information. Previously, we had to build and maintain custom logic to handle these tasks.

Security

Amazon Q Business provides capabilities for authentication, authorization, and access control out of the box. For authentication, we use AWS IAM Identity Center for enterprise single sign-on (SSO), using our internal identity provider called Amazon Federate. After going through a one-time setup for identity management that governs access to our sales assistant application, Amazon Q is aware of the users and roles across our sales teams, making it effortless for our users to access Field Advisor across multiple delivery channels, like the web experience embedded in our CRM, as well as the Slack application.

Also, with our multi-tenant AI application serving thousands of users across multiple sales teams, it’s critical that end-users are only interacting with data and insights that they should be seeing. Like any large organization, we have information firewalls between teams that help us properly safeguard customer information and adhere to privacy and compliance rules. Amazon Q Business provides the mechanisms for protecting each individual document in its knowledge base, simplifying the work required to make sure we’re respecting permissions on the underlying content that’s accessible to a generative AI application. This way, when a user asks a question of the tool, the answer will be generated using only information that the user is permitted to access.

Web experience

As noted earlier, we built a custom web frontend rather than using the Amazon Q built-in web experience. The Amazon Q experience works great, with features like conversation history, sample quick prompts, and Amazon Q Apps. Amazon Q Business makes these features available through the service API, allowing for a customized look and feel on the frontend. We chose this path to have a more fluid integration with our other field-facing tools, control over branding, and sales-specific contextual hints that we’ve built into the experience. As an example, we’re planning to use Amazon Q Apps as the foundation for an integrated prompt library that is personalized for each user and field-facing role.

A look at what’s to come

Field Advisor has seen early success, but it’s still just the beginning, or Day 1 as we like to say here at Amazon. We’re continuing to work on bringing our field-facing teams and field support functions more generative AI across the board. With Amazon Q Business, we no longer need to manage each of the infrastructure components required to deliver a secure, scalable conversational assistant—instead, we can focus on the data, insights, and experience that benefit our salesforce and help them make our customers successful on AWS. As Amazon Q Business adds features, capabilities, and improvements (which we often have the privilege of being able to test in early access) we automatically reap the benefits.

The team that built this sales assistant has been focused on developing—and will be launching soon—deeper integration with our CRM. This will enable teams across all roles to ask detailed questions about their customer and partner accounts, territories, leads and contacts, and sales pipeline. With an Amazon Q custom plugin that uses an internal library used for natural language to SQL (NL2SQL), the same that powers generative SQL capabilities across some AWS database services like Amazon Redshift, we will provide the ability to aggregate and slice-and-dice the opportunity pipeline and trends in product consumption conversationally. Finally, a common request we get is to use the assistant to generate more hyper-personalized customer-facing collateral—think of a first-call deck about AWS products and solutions that’s specific to an individual customer, localized in their language, that draws from the latest available service options, competitive intelligence, and the customer’s existing usage in the AWS Cloud.

Conclusion

In this post, we reviewed how we’ve made a generative AI assistant available to AWS sales teams, powered by Amazon Q Business. As new capabilities land and usage continues to grow, we’re excited to see how our field teams use this, along with other AI solutions, to help customers maximize their value on the AWS Cloud.

The next post in this series will dive deeper into another recent generative AI use case and how we applied this to autonomous sales prospecting. Stay tuned for more, and reach out to us with any questions about how you can drive growth with AI at your business.

About the authors

Joe Travaglini is a Principal Product Manager on the AWS Field Experiences (AFX) team who focuses on helping the AWS salesforce deliver value to AWS customers through generative AI. Prior to AFX, Joe led the product management function for Amazon Elastic File System, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon MemoryDB.

Jonathan Garcia is a Sr. Software Development Manager based in Seattle with over a decade of experience at AWS. He has worked on a variety of products, including data visualization tools and mobile applications. He is passionate about serverless technologies, mobile development, leveraging Generative AI, and architecting innovative high-impact solutions. Outside of work, he enjoys golfing, biking, and exploring the outdoors.

Umesh Mohan is a Software Engineering Manager at AWS, where he has been leading a team of talented engineers for over three years. With more than 15 years of experience in building data warehousing products and software applications, he is now focusing on the use of generative AI to drive smarter and more impactful solutions. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with his family and playing tennis.