Like the character of the same moniker in the James Bond movies, Amazon’s Q chatbot is here to help with your tech needs at work—though it probably can’t outfit you with a hidden-camera pen.

The shopping and cloud giant announced that its enterprise-focused generative AI will become generally available this week, with separate versions aimed at developers and businesses for a price of around $20 per month for the “pro” tiers.

The announcement came ahead of an AI-heavy earnings call in which a strong showing from the company’s AWS division helped power better-than-expected quarterly results.

Like other tech giants this quarter, Amazon is still seeing strong demand from companies looking to tap its cloud services to build their own AI, CEO Andy Jassy said in the call. AWS notched a 17% increase in YoY sales in the first quarter with an 84% YoY jump in profit.

Cue Q: Much of the idea behind Q, which featured heavily in the earnings call, is to help simplify and expedite that development process and thus make AWS potentially more attractive to businesses looking to park their AI operations, according to Doug Seven, GM and director of AWS AI developer experiences.

“Our enterprise customers, they’re really looking at how to make their business more successful and how to get more done with the resources they have and the time constraints they have,” Seven told Tech Brew. “They’re all under competitive pressure; they want to be faster.”

Keep reading here.—PK

The key to keeping your org’s operations smooth and steady? Digital resilience—aka ensuring that your mission-critical digital systems remain secure and reliable, no matter the ups and downs.

That sweet, sweet spot of resilience comes from being able to react to incidents and fix problems faster. Of course, the challenge is making this happen across sprawling tech stacks. Luckily, Splunk can help.

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The NSA has rolled out a Cybersecurity Information Sheet, advising organizations on the best ways to deploy “secure and resilient AI systems.” Companies should ensure they’re implementing “sound security principles” in an organization’s IT environment and its AI systems, which means “robust governance, a well-designed architecture, and secure configurations.”

The guide recommends professionals encrypt sensitive data related to AI, such as “AI model weights, outputs, and logs,” while storing the encryption keys “in a hardware security module for later on-demand decryption.”

“I would say that I think that AI doesn’t necessarily create net new problems or challenges. What it does is it amplifies and accelerates challenges that are already there,” Dana Simberkoff, chief risk, privacy, and information security officer at AvePoint—a software company that provides SaaS and offers data management—told IT Brew.

For security professionals, the report wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in terms of mitigation and prevention, but Simberkoff explained that AI may not “may not necessarily have been prioritized.”

AI is “an acceleration of a problem,” she said. “It may create some new problems, but if you have good data governance principles in place, those can largely be mitigated.”

Keep reading here.—AF

You’d have thought Elon Musk was handing Wall Street a bouquet instead of one of Tesla’s worst quarters in years. After all, his electric carmaker posted Ls across the board for the first three months of the year, performing even worse than analysts expected.

Investors already knew that Tesla was struggling, though. It was selling fewer vehicles even as it cut prices; it was laying off more than 10% of staff. The surprise was that Tesla was speeding up its rollout of new models—among them more affordable EVs—to early 2025 instead of later in that year. The potential for more affordable EVs to reverse Tesla’s fortunes after a year of losing market share was more than hope enough for Wall Street, where Tesla’s stock price shot up as much as 18% over its pre-earnings price.

“This is exactly what investors wanted to hear after a wave of doubt about the company’s commitment to producing a new mass-market car,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

To get a sense of just how pleased investors were by news of new models, take a look at some of the results they were willing to overlook as they bought up shares:

Keep reading on CFO Brew.—GD

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Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

All work, no some play: LinkedIn, lightly cringe though it may be, what with all the earnest posts about success and motivation and living the dream, now has a selling point beyond self-promotion: games.

Morning Brew took notes on the three new games the site debuted this week. We don’t know who’s looking to add to the frustration the New York Times seems to be intent on delivering with Connections and Strands, but if you really need more games in your day, you’ve got another reason to log on to LinkedIn.

Sticking to it: Big Tech companies often introduce features that users are less than thrilled about, but every once in a while something so objectively fun lands that it feels like our duty, as a tech newsletter, to make sure everyone knows about it.

The Stickers feature in iOS 17 is absolutely one of those things. Basically, you can crop things (people, cats, plants, etc.) out of photos and store them in a little library to send like emoji in text messages. It’s so fun; you must try it. Wired has a good explainer on how to make it happen.