Questions and answers are generated from Webex chat and transcirpts
Q: Is there an interdependence for Quick Automate with Quick Flows? Also, if you could explain the difference between using Quick Automate and Quick Flows.
A: There’s no dependency between the two. The difference relates to usage. For Flows, the intention is if you are a user who wants to optimize your daily tasks or the tasks for your team members, then you could use Flows to do something very similar to what was shown in the demo. The difference with Automate comes into the picture when you have larger, more complex workflows. If you see some of the samples in the getting started section, you’ll see automations that can go to 30 steps and beyond for automating business processes. That’s when you would recommend using Automate rather than Flows. The features you get with Automate are definitely more geared towards an enterprise trying to change how they do work with all the systems and information they want to see, and how they integrate the human in the loop aspect. Flows is a way for individuals to simplify their own work with the potential of sharing it with others. Automate has a lot more control over things like logging, determining ROI, and only certain people can deploy an automation because this is all working off of pay as you go. There are a lot more robust capabilities for an enterprise to automate their stuff, whereas Flows answers a lot of an individual’s case for automating things.
Q: Is there an upgrade required to create these projects, groups, and agents within Amazon BI?
A: You don’t need upgrades to perform the steps that were followed in the demo. The only exception is the integrations - you have to have those in place. You should have all the capabilities that were covered in the session within your account.
Q: Can I pull in an agent I already created, or do they need to be net new agents or recreated in Automate?
A: There are two ways you could use agents outside Automate. One is you could use the Bedrock connector and use a custom model in your custom agent. So instead of selecting the managed Pro version, you could use a custom one where you define an ID. The other option is if it’s not in Bedrock, you could also create a REST API connector to integrate it that way as well. So there are a couple of options.
Q: Can we granularly define which LLMs are powering the agents in Automate or Spaces?
A: Yes, similarly to the previous answer, you can provide the specific model ID for the custom agent action in Automate. For Spaces, we’re not 100% sure on the answer, but we can follow up on that.
Q: Can these tasks be created to a ticket system?
A: Yes, absolutely. Instead of having a pattern of ingesting and analyzing emails, you could use cases in Salesforce, for example, and process those. The idea here is you want to analyze - it could be a ticket or email - but you analyze the body with information, some object with information, process it and then take action on it. So you could use any of the available connectors to ticketing systems and apply similar flows.
Q: Can you upload or download Excel sheets with Automate?
A: Yes to both. Similarly to the interaction with emails, you can either use the S3 connector and download Excel files and process them using that approach, or you could just have an agent download those Excel files by providing it as a tool. We have separate actions to process Excel files as well, for things like adding columns, etc.
Q: Does Quick Automate have the capability like Flows to get data from dashboards?
A: As of today, it does not, but we’re always building functionalities and features on the platform. As of today, Flows has that capability.
Q: Is there a roadmap for mirroring the flow and agent actions within Automate? Specifically the internal actions like Outlook, OneDrive, Asana, etc.
A: It’s definitely possible, but we can’t comment on the specifics for the roadmaps for those internal toolings. We’d have to reach out to the owners of those specific accounts. This is only relevant to internal Amazon connections. Any integration that is set up is possible to set up in any account, but the dependency is on the admins of the connectors. So for Outlook, for example, those are more internal decisions, not related to the product roadmap really.