Internal Help Center AI Chatbot on Amazon Q Business
A managed, plug-and-play internal help-desk bot delivered in a fraction of the time a fully custom pipeline would have taken, styled to match the client's own internal tooling and streaming responses over WebSocket for chat-speed answers.
Compass is a separate, internal-only assistant for a client's own employees to self-serve answers from internal documentation. Lower stakes than a customer-facing assistant, a narrower audience, and a much shorter runway to ship — a good candidate for Amazon Q Business's plug-and-play knowledge base model instead of a fully custom RAG pipeline.
Not every internal chatbot needs a custom pipeline.
The client needed employees to get instant answers from internal documentation without waiting on a fully custom RAG build, an experience that looked and felt like its own internal tools rather than Amazon Q Business's out-of-the-box interface, and the same chat-speed responsiveness users expect from any modern chat product.
- Instant answers from internal documentation, without a fully custom RAG build
- A look and feel matching the client's own internal tools
- Chat-speed responsiveness despite running on a managed backend
- A tight timeline — weeks, not months
How we built it.
Amazon Q Business as the retrieval engine
Internal documentation was attached to Amazon Q Business as a knowledge base data source, letting the managed service handle chunking, embedding, retrieval, and answer generation without any custom orchestration code.
API Gateway WebSocket API
Rather than request/response HTTP polling, Compass communicates over a WebSocket connection through API Gateway, streaming responses back to the front-end as they're generated.
A custom React front-end over Q Business's default UI
Cosmoxyn built a bespoke chat interface on top of Amazon Q Business so the experience matched the client's internal tooling rather than looking like an out-of-the-box AWS product.
The solution.
Compass — an internal help center chatbot on Amazon Q Business
Internal documentation attached to Amazon Q Business as a managed knowledge base, giving employees full retrieval-augmented answers without a custom RAG pipeline behind it.
A bespoke React front-end matching internal tooling
Rather than shipping Q Business's default interface, Cosmoxyn built a custom chat UI styled to match the client's existing internal tools.
Real-time streaming over WebSocket
Compass communicates over an API Gateway WebSocket connection, streaming responses to the front-end as they're generated.
A managed retrieval pipeline with zero custom backend orchestration
No Lambda functions, no custom retrieval code — Amazon Q Business handles chunking, embedding, and retrieval directly against the attached knowledge base.
Outcomes that shipped.
Internal employees got instant, chat-speed answers from internal documentation through Compass without leaving the look and feel of the client's own tools, and Compass shipped in roughly a third the time a fully custom pipeline would have taken without sacrificing responsiveness. Validated a build-vs-buy playbook for AI chatbots: reach for Amazon Q Business when speed of delivery and lower stakes matter more than fine-grained control over retrieval, feedback, and prompt iteration.
What we took with us.
- 01Bring a lightweight feedback loop to Compass sooner — even a simplified thumbs up/down from day one would have made it easier to measure answer quality.
- 02Tighten WebSocket reconnect handling based on early production usage — real client network conditions surfaced reconnect edge cases not fully visible in initial testing.
Want something like this?
The tiers below are how we'd quote a build in the same space.
Have a build that needs this level of thinking?
Free 30-min audit. We'll tell you what to build, what it'd cost, and whether we're the right shop.