What is Amazon Q Business?

Amazon Q Business is a fully managed, generative AI-powered assistant designed to answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and complete tasks using your enterprise data. It enables end users to receive immediate, permissions-aware responses from enterprise data sources, complete with citations, for various use cases such as IT, HR, and benefits help desks.
Additionally, Amazon Q Business helps streamline tasks and speed up problem-solving. You can utilize it to create and share task automation applications or perform routine actions like submitting time-off requests and sending meeting invites.

Integrating Amazon Q Business Application with Service Now Plugin

In this blog post, we are going to integrate the Amazon Q Business Application with the ServiceNow plugin to provide an easy way for end users to raise incidents in ServiceNow.

Create new Amazon Q Business Application

• Login to the AWS portal and search for Amazon Q Business.

• On the Amazon Q Business page, click on “Get Started”.

You will be redirected to the Applications page. Click on “Create Application” to initiate the application creation process.

• In the create application wizard, provide the application name and select whether your application needs a web experience. This will enable users to get a Microsoft Copilot-like page where they can interact with generative AI.

• In the access management method, you can either choose IAM Identity Center or IAM Identity Provider. AWS recommends selecting IAM Identity Center. If the IAM Identity Center organization instance is not created and available, there is an option to create one.

• Under the Quick Start User, you can select the user account you created in the IAM Identity Center. You can also add users and groups later once the application is created.

• You also need to select the subscription type for the user. You can choose between “Amazon Q Business Lite” and “Amazon Q Business Pro” licenses. Amazon Q Business Lite does not support the use of plugins and will give an error message about the license limitation.

In the application details, you can either let Amazon Q Business auto-create a service-linked role or you can map an already created role to provide authorization to the service. You need another role to authorize the web experience as well. Click on Create to create the application.

Integrating with ServiceNow Plugin

• Once the application is created, click on the application. In the enhancement tab under the left pane, select Plugins.

• Click on “Add Plugin” to add the ServiceNow plugin to the application. The ServiceNow plugin is a default plugin available in Amazon Q Business. Click on the “+” sign next to ServiceNow to add the plugin.

• In the ServiceNow add plugin wizard, provide the name of the plugin and the ServiceNow URL. I used a personal developer instance for this blog.

• Under the authentication section, you need to create a new secret which is the username and password for the ServiceNow user. I used a normal ServiceNow user with the “user” role for this blog.

• In the Create an AWS Secret Manager Secret window, provide the name of the secret, username, and password of the ServiceNow user.

• Once created, select the secret from the drop-down menu.

• Under the authorize section, select create and use a new service role for providing authorization to Amazon Q Business to access the Secrets Manager.

• Click on Create to create the plugin.

Optional: Customize the Web Experience for End Users

To customize the web experience, such as a custom name for your AI assistant, description, and sample queries, click on the application and then click on Customize Web Experience. You can change the title, subtitle, welcome message, etc. Once done, click Save to save the application web experience settings.

Launching the Web Portal and Asking the AI to Create an Incident

The web portal URL can be accessed from the application page. The web portal looks like the Microsoft Copilot page as shown below.

Click on the “three dots” next to the chat window and select “Use Plugin: ServiceNow Plugin”.

In the prompt window, I requested the AI to log an incident for my laptop slowness. The AI will automatically generate the incident form and fill in the descriptions.

Once submitted, the AI will create the incident on behalf of the user.

You can verify the same in the service now portal