Amazon Q Business is an assistant powered by fully managed, generative AI, enabling businesses to reach their full potential in data and organizational knowledge. With Amazon Q Business, you can quickly access answers to questions, generate overviews and content, and complete tasks using the expertise and information stored in various data sources and enterprise systems within your organization. At the heart of this innovative solution is a data source connector that seamlessly integrates content from multiple data sources such as SharePoint, Confluence, and Smartsheet with enterprise systems, and integrates indexes.
In this post, we’ll show you how to integrate Smartsheet with Amazon Q Business to integrate natural language and generator AI capabilities to enhance generic AI capabilities. SmartSheet, an AI-enhanced enterprise-grade work management platform, helps users manage large projects, programs and processes. By combining Amazon Q Business with SmartSheet, business users, customer solutions managers, product managers and more can gain a deeper understanding of their work by asking natural language questions.
Below are some examples of questions you can ask your Amazon Q business to gain actionable insights.
- Update project status – Get quick insight into the health of your project
- What is the status of the website redesign project?
- Are your mobile apps on track on the planned day?
- Which projects are currently delayed on the Q3 Roadmap?
- Task Management – Find information about tasks and action items
- What tasks are assigned to John Doe?
- Have you completed your marketing plan?
- What is the deadline for the customer survey presentation?
- Resource Allocation – Understand resource distribution and workloads
- How many resources are allocated to a product launch project?
- Which projects require additional personnel based on the current task load?
- Budget tracking – Monitor project and department budgets in real time
- What is the current budget status for your marketing campaign?
- How much budget does the customer service training initiative have?
Smart seat overview
SmartSheet combines the simplicity of spreadsheets with powerful capabilities in collaboration, workflow automation, content management and reporting. Smartsheet makes mission-critical work safely and reliably large-scale for thousands of organizations around the world, including over 85% of Fortune 500 companies. Customers rely on smart seats to open thousands of new restaurant locations, distribute vaccines, and build rockets.
In this example, we are using SmartSheet to track the tasks of a software development project. This sheet contains rows task, Owner, team, stage, start date, End dateand more.
Overview of Amazon Q Business Smart Sheet Connectors
Integrating Smartsheet as an Amazon Q Business data source allows you to seamlessly extract insights. For example, Service Operations Managers can use new connectors to deliver complex projects more efficiently and consistently. Asking questions specific to the Amazon Q Business Intelligent Assistant allows teams to access insights from multiple data sources, including sheets, conversations, and attachments in connected smart sheets. Equipped with Generator AI, assistants perform deep searches within your data while respecting access and permission levels, saving valuable time and enhancing project monitoring. This streamlined process improves client retention, improves accuracy and improves overall quality of service.
AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or CreateDataSource API.
The Amazon Q Business SmartSheet Connector understands user permissions and enforces them strictly at the time of the query. This ensures that users cannot access content they do not have permissions. For information on managing security, see Amazon Q Business Identity and Access Management.
Prerequisites
Before you begin, make sure you have completed the following prerequisites:
- With smart seats
- You can access Smartsheet events that report APIs. Use the Event API Access Request Form to request access for the organization shown in the following screenshot:
- Smart seat access token. This is necessary to connect your smart seats to your Amazon Q business. To generate tokens, see Authentication and Access Tokens. Be aware of the generated access tokens as they must be stored in AWS Secrets Manager as part of configuring your Amazon Q application.
- With an AWS account
- You can access Smartsheet events that report APIs. Use the Event API Access Request Form to request access for the organization shown in the following screenshot:
For detailed guidance on completing these steps, see Prerequisites for Connecting Amazon Q Business to SmartSheet.
Configure and prepare the Amazon Q Business Smartsheet connector
Follow the steps below to create a retriever and data source:
- under Enhancement In the navigation pane, select Data Source. Next, select Add an indexas shown in the following screenshot.
- under Index Provisioning,choice Companies And then choose Add an indexas shown in the following screenshot. Companies The options are ideal for workloads that require maximum update performance.
- under Enhancement In the left navigation pane, select Data Source.
- In Data Source Page, select Add a data sourceas shown in the following screenshot.
- In Add a data source page, Data Source Add sections Smart seat Follow the steps to connect Amazon Q Business to your SmartSheet using the console and to source your Amazon Q Business data to your SmartSheet.
- In Smart seat On the Data Source page, select and enter the following information:
- Data Source Name
- AWS Secrets Manager Secret
- IAM Roles and Role Names
- Synchronous scope
- frequency
It only takes a few minutes to create a data source. After setup, the console will display a green success notification and the data source will be displayed. Data Source Details Sections as shown in the following screenshot.
Next, you need to sync the smart sheet data source. in Synchronization history Section, Selection Sync now Start the intake process when raw from source to Amazon Q Business. Once the sync job is complete, the data source will be fully available, as shown in the following screenshot.
Amazon Q Business and Smartsheet connectors are working
You can create an Amazon Q Business application and successfully sync your Smartsheet data sources, then test your integration. Ask project-related questions and observe how your app responds in real time. Follow these steps:
- In the left navigation pane, select AmazonQ-SmartSheet-Connector Applications and Selections Expanded URLas shown in the following screenshot.
In this example, we asked the following questions about projects captured in smart sheets, and Amazon Q Business generated answers to the project owner regarding status and provided additional information for each task.
Question 1 – What is the project status for creating a UI?
Amazon Q Business Response – As shown in the following screenshot, Amazon Q Business generated a response identifying the status in progress, the names of team members who will perform the work, and the scheduled completion date.
Question 2 – List all projects by deadline
Amazon Q Business Response -As shown in the following screenshot, Amazon Q Business generated an answer and listed the project by deadline containing a quote link from the smart sheet.
Question 3 -What kind of projects does Chloe Evans handle? Can you provide more information about that?
Amazon Q Business Response -As shown in the following screenshot, Amazon Q Business has generated an answer summarizing the tasks Chloe Evans is handling.
troubleshooting
If you run into a problem while asking a question in Amazon Q Business, the problem may be because you lack the necessary permissions to access certain information. Amazon Q Business strictly enforces document permissions set for data sources. Follow these steps to troubleshoot.
- Check index creation status – Check if the Smartsheet connector is successfully indexed in your Amazon Q business application. This ensures that your data sources are properly integrated.
- Check user permissions – Make sure your SmartSheet user account has the necessary permissions to access and read information from the sheet. Proper permissions are important to enable Amazon Q Business to retrieve and process the data it needs.
Additionally, as an administrator who manages your Amazon Q Business applications, you can follow these steps to troubleshoot these issues using document-level sync reports. These reports provide comprehensive and detailed insights integrated into the synchronization history, including details, metadata, and access control lists (ACLs) for all documents processed during the Data Source Sync job.
A detailed documentation report is stored in a new sync_run_history_report log stream under the Amazon Q Business Application Log Group, making important Sync job details available on demand when troubleshooting. See Document Level Synchronization Reports for more information.
I used Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights to query as shown in the following screenshot SYNC_RUN_HISTORY_REPORT Log stream. In other words, we were able to check the sync status in detail.
cleaning
Complete the following steps to clean up your resources:
- Select the app you created earlier and select it erase.
- In the Amazon Q Business Console, select application In the navigation pane.
- Select the application you created action Please select the menu erase.
Conclusion
In this post, we explored how Amazon Q Business can seamlessly integrate with SmartSheet to help businesses unlock their data and knowledge potential fully. Smartsheet connectors allow organizations to quickly find answers with their teams, accelerate project tracking, streamline task management, automate workflows, and enhance collaboration.
Now that you’ve learned how to integrate Amazon Q Business with smart sheet content, it’s time to make the most of your organization’s data potential. To get started, sign up for your Amazon Q Business account and follow the instructions in this post to set up your Smart Sheet Connector. Then, ask an Amazon Q Business Natural Language question and see Surface Insights in seconds.
About the author
Brandon Sator I am Senior Director of Corporate Development at SmartSheet. He has over 15 years of experience helping companies develop inorganic growth strategies and oversee corporate development activities, including mergers and acquisitions, strategic partnerships, and new business incubation. At Smartsheet, he plays a pivotal role in fostering relationships with Smartsheet technology partners and developing co-partner initiatives.
Aidin Koslowshahi He is AWS’ Amazon Q Specialist Solutions Architect, and he brings his passion for generative AI and serverless applications. As an active member of the AI/ML and serverless community, he specializes in Amazon Q Business and Developer Solutions, while serving as a generative AI expert. He helps customers accelerate collaboration and innovation across the AI/ML ecosystem while implementing best practices.
Chinmayee Rane AWS Generation AI Specialist Solution Architect focuses on Generation AI. She helps independent software vendors (ISVs) accelerate the adoption of generator AI by designing scalable and impactful solutions. With a powerful background in applied mathematics and machine learning, she specializes in intelligent document processing and AI-driven innovation. Outside of work, she enjoys salsa and bachata dance.
Rokeshchauhan He is AWS Senior Technical Account Manager and partners with enterprise customers to optimize AWS travel and drive cloud success. He is a member of the AI/ML community and serves as a generative AI expert. As a 12x AWS Certified TAM, he brings deep technical expertise throughout the AWS platform. Before joining AWS, he established leadership positions such as Project Lead and Sr. Database Admin, building extensive database and operational experience across multiple organizations.
