New machine learning powered capability in Amazon QuickSight lets anyone type questions about their business data in natural language and receive accurate answers with relevant visualizations in seconds

The National Football League, Forwood, and PeopleScout among customers using Amazon QuickSight Q

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon QuickSight Q, a new capability in Amazon QuickSight that gives anyone in an organization the ability to ask business questions using natural language and receive accurate answers with relevant visualizations that help them gain insights from the data. Amazon QuickSight Q does not depend on prebuilt dashboards or reports to deliver visualizations, which removes the need for business intelligence (BI) analysts to update a dashboard every time a new business question arises, so anyone can ask their questions and receive visual answers in seconds. Customers can easily refine the way Amazon QuickSight Q understands questions (and thus produces answers) with an easy-to-use editor, which removes the need for complex data preparation before users can ask questions of data in natural language. Amazon QuickSight Q uses machine learning to interpret the intent of a question and analyze the correct data to provide accurate answers to business questions quickly. Amazon QuickSight Q also provides auto-complete suggestions for key phrases and business terms, and automatically performs spell checking and acronym/synonym matching, so users do not have to worry about typos or remembering the exact business terms for their data. There are no upfront commitments to use Amazon QuickSight Q, and customers only pay for the number of users or queries. To get started with Amazon QuickSight Q, visit aws.amazon.com/quicksight/q.

Companies want to be more data-driven in their decision making, but the cost and complexity of traditional BI solutions prohibits most companies from putting their data to work in meaningful ways. For example, companies would like to back up high-velocity decisions with insights from their data, like whether to adjust prices based on real-time trends. To address this challenge, many customers use Amazon QuickSight, a scalable, serverless, embeddable, machine learning powered BI service built for the cloud that makes it easy to quickly create and publish interactive BI dashboards. Customers like Amazon QuickSight’s ability to automatically interpret and describe what the data in a BI dashboard means in plain language, but these customers also want the ability for any user to ask business questions of their data in plain language and receive accurate answers and relevant visualizations. While some BI tools and vendors have attempted to solve this challenge, the existing approaches either require that BI teams spend months preparing and modeling data in advance, or sacrifice accuracy and relevancy for the speed of getting visualizations more quickly. Neither of these trade-offs is ideal for customers who simply want highly relevant insight from their data quickly.

Amazon QuickSight Q gives anyone access to powerful analytics with the ability to ask business questions of their data in natural language and receive accurate answers with relevant visualizations in seconds. To ask a question, users simply type it into Amazon QuickSight Q. As users begin typing their questions in natural language, Amazon QuickSight Q provides auto-complete suggestions for key phrases and business terms, so users are freed from worrying about typos or remembering the exact terms in the business data. Amazon QuickSight Q uses machine learning (natural language processing, schema understanding, and semantic parsing for SQL code generation) to automatically understand the meaning and relationships among business data, providing users with accurate answers and relevant visualizations in response to questions in seconds—freeing BI teams from the time-consuming task of updating calculations, visuals, reports, and dashboards each time a user has a new question. An easy-to-use editor allows customers to refine the way Amazon QuickSight Q understands questions, removing the need for complex data preparation before users can ask questions of data in natural language. Because Amazon QuickSight Q does not depend on prebuilt dashboards and reports, users can explore all their data and are not limited to asking only a specific set of questions, providing end users with the insight they need in seconds. The machine learning models that power Amazon QuickSight Q are pretrained on data from various domains (sales reporting, ads and marketing, financial services, healthcare, and sports analytics), so it can also understand complex business language and provide accurate answers and visualizations. For example, sales users can ask, “How are my sales tracking against quota?” or retail customers can ask, “What are the top products sold week-over-week by region?” Amazon QuickSight Q gives BI teams insight into the questions end users most frequently want answered, so they can make improvements to their data models and dashboards. Amazon QuickSight Q also continually improves over time based on the auto-complete phrases a user selects. With Amazon QuickSight Q, even the most non-technical users in an organization can now easily ask questions of data in natural language and receive visual answers in seconds, providing the ability for anyone to benefit from BI visualizations and allowing organizations to derive greater benefit from the business insights Amazon QuickSight Q offers.

“Customers love that Amazon QuickSight makes it easy for them to perform advanced analytics without prior data science experience, and they’re using it in ways that are surprising and delightful,” says Matt Wood, VP of Business Analytics, AWS. “Now, with Amazon QuickSight Q, anyone within an organization has the ability to ask natural language questions and receive highly relevant answers and visualizations. For the first time, anyone can tap into the full power of data to make quick, reliable, data-driven decisions to plan more efficiently and be more responsive to their end users.”

Amazon QuickSight Q currently supports questions in English and is generally available today to customers running Amazon QuickSight in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (London), with availability in additional AWS Regions coming soon.

The National Football League (NFL), the highest level of American Football in the world, is a professional American Football League consisting of 32 teams. The NFL uses AWS to power Next Gen Stats and track complex data, including player speed, field location, and movement patterns. “Amazon QuickSight Q allows both data experts and novices to have a more seamless and intuitive experience within Next Gen Stats. Content creators will now be able to ask questions similarly to how they would ask another person, and receive clear and customizable visual answers in return,” said Michael Chi, Director of NFL Next Gen Stats at NFL. “QuickSight Q has the ability to significantly expand our research application’s userbase by transcending the traditional business intelligence user interface, allowing users to think through a question semantically rather than technically. NFL teams will be able to quickly get the answers they need to make decisions prior to a game, while NFL Network and broadcast producers will be able to get live game statistics for discussion points without requiring technical training. We are looking forward to expanding the use of QuickSight Q and making Next Gen Stats more accessible to everyone.”

Forwood is an innovative, values-driven company with a laser focus on critical risks and fatality prevention. “With Amazon QuickSight Q, we bring life-saving safety analytics to more people than ever before,” said Faye Crompton, Head of Analytics, Forwood. “Our FAST (Forwood Analytical Self-Service Tool for Reporting) users will now have the opportunity to ask their own questions via the natural language-based interface to query and quickly visualize fatality risks on their sites. This is ground breaking in the industry, making fatality prevention data readily available to workers at all levels of the organization, not just to those with experience in analytics and data reporting. Amazon QuickSight Q will enable all of our users to identify sites or work areas that have an increasing fatality risk, based on emerging trends in non-conformance to safety standards. Amazon QuickSight Q is a great addition to our innovative suite of tools and ensures Forwood’s critical risk management solution ‘CRM’ has the most advanced data analysis capabilities to provide our customers with unparalleled insights into their safety and risk status.”

PeopleScout is a leading global provider of Recruitment Process Outsourcing solutions, managing talent solutions that support total workforce needs. “The addition of Amazon QuickSight Q to Affinix Analytics, our award-winning platform that provides clients with insights and operational metrics to drive business decisions throughout the recruitment process, will reduce the manual effort required to analyze data, enhance the ability of clients and delivery teams to make data-driven decisions, and optimize the talent process while providing a best-in-class experience for candidates,” said Anna Turner, Senior Vice President of Product, PeopleScout. “As consumers in a technology-enabled world, we expect an on-demand experience for everything we do. With Amazon QuickSight Q, we are thrilled to bring that same experience to business users through on-demand answers and data visualizations in seconds with Affinix Analytics.”

About Amazon Web Services

For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 81 Availability Zones within 25 geographic regions, with announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and eight more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

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