Amazon QuickSight AWS re:Invent 2023 recap

AWS re:Invent 2023, held this year from November 27 through December 1 in Las Vegas, Nevada, is a learning conference hosted by AWS for the global cloud computing community. The in-person event features keynote announcements, innovation talks, workshops, builder labs, and more.

Amazon QuickSight powers data-driven organizations with unified business intelligence (BI) at hyperscale for all users. QuickSight enables organizations to deliver insights with modern interactive dashboards, embedded analytics, pixel-perfect reports, generative AI capabilities, and natural language. These consolidated BI capabilities of QuickSight have earned it a position in the Leader Quadrant on the G2 Grid for Analytics Platforms.

This post walks you through a full recap of QuickSight at this year’s re:Invent, including key launch announcements, sessions available virtually, and additional resources for continued learning.

Feature launches

In this section, we share key feature launches for QuickSight.

Generative BI capabilities

Powered by Amazon Bedrock, QuickSight now provides generative BI capabilities for its users, including enhanced authoring experience, on-demand insights, and data storytelling. Dashboard authors can now create or change visuals, and build calculations using natural language prompting. Business users can ask questions to extract insights using Amazon Q. They can also pick visuals for QuickSight to build a story using Generative AI around the chosen data points in seconds. To learn more, refer to Announcing Generative BI capabilities in Amazon QuickSight.

Introduction to the new QuickSight authoring experience

QuickSight launched a new analysis experience, enabling a more intuitive and efficient way for you to author dashboards. We redesigned key experiences with a three-pane layout and the analysis toolbar for ease of navigation and access to improve efficiency. Additionally, core authoring workflows such as adding visuals, configuring field placement, and applying formatting are redesigned to streamline the creation process.

Advanced analytical capabilities

To introduce flexibility for users around the globe, we launched the custom time zone feature, where dashboard authors can customize the entire dashboard to your time zone with a single click. Similarly, the feature enables you to select a custom week start to fit your location and industry need.

Automated SPICE capacity increment

Now you can effortlessly opt in to the capacity auto-purchase with just one click. This new SPICE auto-purchase capability eliminates the need to estimate usage and manually purchase SPICE capacity each time. Instead, QuickSight will automatically acquire the necessary capacity to meet your usage requirements, avoiding data ingestion failures for lack of capacity.

Trusted identity propagation with Amazon Redshift

At re:Invent, AWS IAM Identity Center launched trusted identity propagation, which allows seamless access across a subset of our AWS analytics services, including QuickSight, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, AWS Lake Formation, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) via Amazon S3 Access Grants, through single sign-on. This means that a user that accesses a dashboard in QuickSight has their identity propagated to Amazon Redshift. Similarly, in Amazon Redshift, fine-grained data permissions are applied on the data before the data is presented in a QuickSight asset to the user. This enables centrally enforced data permissions, seamless access to Redshift from QuickSight without passwords, and end-to-end auditability for admins. For more information on how to enable this feature, refer to Authorizing connections from Amazon QuickSight to Amazon Redshift clusters.

DevOps capabilities

We expanded our APIs to treat BI dashboards as code. This includes integration with Amazon EventBridge to support event-driven scaling and automate workflows such as continuous deployment and backups. Developers can write simple rules to indicate which events are of interest to them, and what actions to take when an event matches a rule. For more information, see Automate your Amazon QuickSight assets deployment using the new Amazon EventBridge integration. Additionally, the latest SDK version 2.0 supports TypeScript, ES6 (async/await) syntax, and utility features that enable developers to quickly build analytics experiences within their applications. To learn know more about how we have further simplifying the developer workflow, refer to Enhance your analytics embedding experience with the new Amazon QuickSight JavaScript SDK.

QuickSight Arena in the QuickSight Community

The QuickSight Community is a one-stop-shop for your BI learning journey. Learn from other BI enthusiasts across the globe, ask and answer questions, access over 300 learning resources, and explore what’s new—all from one central location! Now you can learn new data visualization skills and showcase your data analytics expertise to the world using the new QuickSight Arena, an embedded instance of QuickSight, within the QuickSight Community. With Arena, you can do the following:

• Explore creating QuickSight data visualization dashboards for free
• Publish dashboards to the Community Gallery to showcase your skills
• Clone underlying analysis views of published dashboards
• Include dashboards depicting your use case while posting questions in the QuickSight Community Q&A

Get started with QuickSight Arena today.

For details on all these features, watch AWS re:Invent Recap 2023: 2023 Amazon QuickSight Learning Series.

Also, check out select QuickSight re:Invent sessions on the QuickSight Community.

Keynotes

Adam Selipsky, Chief Executive Officer of Amazon Web Services

Watch Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon Web Services, as he shares his perspective on cloud transformation. He highlights innovations in data, infrastructure, and artificial intelligence and machine learning that are helping AWS customers achieve their goals faster, mine untapped potential, and create a better future.

Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of AWS Data and Machine Learning

Watch Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Database, Analytics, and Machine Learning (ML) at AWS explores the powerful relationship between humans, data, and AI, unfolding right before us. Generative AI is augmenting our productivity and creativity in new ways, while also being fueled by massive amounts of enterprise data and human intelligence. Swami discovers how you can use your company data to build differentiated generative AI applications and accelerate productivity for employees across your organization. You will also hear from customer speakers with real-world examples of how they’ve used their data to support their generative AI use cases and create new experiences for their customers.

Innovation talks

Data drives transformation: Data foundations with AWS analytics

Data is the differentiator that drives your current business needs while simultaneously preparing you for the future. As your company transforms, you need a data foundation for business applications, new technical innovations, and data-driven business initiatives. Watch G2 Krishnamoorthy, Vice President of AWS Analytics, discuss strategies for embedding analytics into your applications and ideas for building a data foundation that supports your business initiatives. With new capabilities for self-service and simpler builder experiences, you can democratize data access for line-of-business users, analysts, scientists, and engineers. Hear inspiring stories from adidas, GlobalFoundries, and University of California, Irvine.

Breakout sessions

Generative BI in Amazon QuickSight

You can infuse generative AI into how your business users interact with data. In this session, watch Zac Woodall, Principal PM-T at Amazon QuickSight, showcase the generative BI capabilities of QuickSight that allow business analysts to author dashboards using natural language and how business users can dive deep into data by simply asking questions. Hear from customers GoDaddy and Huron and learn more about their QuickSight use cases.

What’s new with Amazon QuickSight

In this session, learn about all the newly launched capabilities of QuickSight, including generative AI–powered authoring and storytelling experiences. Explore tighter integration with embedded applications, richer visualizations, centralized identity management, Amazon SageMaker Canvas integrations, CI/CD workflows, and much more.

Enhance your applications with Amazon QuickSight embedded analytics

In this session, watch Jose Kunnackal John, Director Core BI at Amazon QuickSight, demonstrate how you can embed visualizations, dashboards, and ML-powered natural language queries into your applications at scale with no infrastructure to manage. Hear from Extensiv and a multinational life sciences organization about how they are embedding rich analytics into their applications, scaling interactive insights, and authoring capabilities to thousands of users.

Modernize business reporting with Amazon QuickSight

Learn along with Rahul Easwar, Sr. Product Manager at Amazon QuickSight, how you can migrate legacy reporting to the cloud and deliver a unified user experience at scale with QuickSight. Hear how Topgolf and a multinational manufacturing company consolidated their dashboarding and reporting workloads in QuickSight to lower costs. Also discover how to use the new pixel-perfect reporting APIs to automate high-demand workloads.

Scale enterprise BI securely with Amazon QuickSight

In this session, learn how BMW uses QuickSight to integrate BI into their enterprise cloud data strategies. Discover how you can deliver insights to all your users while maintaining security with centralized access management, governed data discovery, and scalable insights. Hear how business users can benefit from QuickSight and integrations with AWS services such as Amazon DataZone, IAM Identity Center, SageMaker Canvas, Lake Formation, and more.

Interactive cost reporting with Amazon QuickSight

Gain a deeper understanding of cloud spend to create a culture of cost-consciousness and operating efficiently on AWS. In this session, learn how to turn your AWS Cost and Usage Reports into actionable insights with a few clicks with cost and usage dashboards and QuickSight. Understand key use cases and patterns you can monitor to drive your cost-optimization efforts. Lastly, dive deep on how you can tailor these insights to meet your organization’s needs.

Other activities

Over the course of 3 days, QuickSight enthusiasts had a unique opportunity to join the QuickSight team for breakfast bites and coffee at the QuickSight Breakfast Club community meetups. Customers enjoyed meeting in-person with our experts, learning about our new features, and connecting with knowledgeable customers and partners. Attendees left with swag and joined in as we celebrated our Top 10 QuickSight Experts for 2023 from the QuickSight Community.

The QuickSight kiosks were open during all expo hours. Attendees were able to make connections, ask questions, watch demonstrations, and learn about our new features from the experts themselves.

The QuickSight booth within the AWS Village was a great opportunity for all to meet with experts, ask questions, and experience live demos for our newly launched capabilities.

Check out additional photos on the QuickSight Community.

Useful resources

You can always learn more about QuickSight through these helpful resources:

• QuickSight Community – Check out this one-stop-shop for your BI learning journey, with searchable Q&A, what’s new, how-to videos and articles, demos, events, Developer Corner on embedded analytics, user groups, and more
• AWS Databases & Analytics LinkedIn – Follow to stay up to date about latest AWS Analytics launches and workshops, and engage with the data community
• QuickSight YouTube channel – Subscribe to stay up to date on the latest QuickSight workshops, how-tos, and demo videos

Conclusion

With the QuickSight re:Invent session recordings and additional resources, we hope that you learn how to dive deeper into your data with QuickSight. For continued learning, check out more information and resources at Amazon QuickSight. For a summary of all the notable new features in QuickSight from 2023, read the Amazon QuickSight: 2023 year in review blog post.

About the authors

Heather Hughes is a senior product marking manager for Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Web Service’s cloud-native, fully managed BI service.

Bharat Badrinath is the head of product marketing for Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Web Service’s cloud-native, fully managed BI service.