AWS unveils Amazon Q, cutting data analysis from a week to 12 hours

AWS has unveiled Amazon Q, an AI assistant for workplace use, positioning it as an enterprise AI tool capable of carrying out real tasks — not just answering queries — through built-in AI agent functionality.

The company also showcased early results from domestic adopters. Megazone Cloud said it used Amazon Q to cut data analysis time from more than a week to under 12 hours.

Park Hye-young, principal solutions architect at AWS Korea, made the announcement Wednesday at a press briefing and hands-on session held at the AWS Korea office in Gangnam-gu, Seoul.

Park said the AI market is evolving toward "AI agents" — systems that can reason and act autonomously — and that the ability to integrate AI into existing workflows and systems has become a critical differentiator in that shift.

Amazon Q is an AI assistant available across desktops, mobile devices, browsers and productivity tools including Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word. It connects to users' local files, calendars, email and workplace apps such as Slack to build contextual awareness. The assistant runs persistently on the desktop, keeps data in one place and consolidates notifications from multiple channels into a single activity feed, unifying the work environment.

AWS said Amazon Q integrates business intelligence functionality natively into the product from the outset. It indexes and analyzes both structured data and unstructured content such as documents and emails, enabling users to generate dashboards and insights through natural language alone. When it detects a customer at risk of churning, it automatically triggers alerts to the responsible team member and executes the relevant workflow.

The event also featured case studies from domestic companies. Among Korean firms, Black Yak, Megazone Cloud and Ilsung IS have all adopted Amazon Q.

Black Yak said it used Amazon Q to boost data utilization among frontline staff, which had been low due to the complexity of its previous business intelligence tools. The company has expanded deployment to more than 100 accounts across five business divisions, reducing the burden of recurring reporting tasks.

Megazone Cloud said it automated the search and analysis of research notes and proposals through Amazon Q's integrated search capabilities, cutting data analysis time from more than a week to under 12 hours. More than 100 people across its sales and technology teams now use the tool.

Ilsung IS rolled out Amazon Q to all 160 employees company-wide, deploying chatbots and AI agents across every department. In one example, a three-person academic medicine team cut a paper-search task that previously took two hours per person down to just five minutes.

Meanwhile, a Gartner survey of 782 infrastructure and operations leaders conducted in April found that 72 percent of AI projects failed to deliver the expected return on investment. The most commonly cited reasons were poor integration with existing workflows, insufficient AI-related capabilities (38 percent) and inadequate data preparation (38 percent).

By contrast, the 33 percent of organizations that did report results shared a common trait: they had successfully integrated AI into their existing systems and business processes.