Innovation History of Q Assist

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Q Labs Status: Graduated ✅

The Q Assist Story

Since last year, Q Assist–our context-aware Gen AI suite–has been a key item on our product roadmap, with a major new release expected in the first half of this year. With the launch of Q Labs in March 2025, we thought now would be a good time to look back at Q Assist’s journey from an innovation prototype to a mature production offering. For the latest information on Q Assist as a product offering, please refer to the blog: Your AI Copilot is Only as Good as Your Data Foundation

The initial idea for Q Assist came to us in March 2023–a couple of months after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT–from one of our colleagues who had created a very convincing mock-up version of an LLM-powered assistant for Quantexa in PowerPoint!

Impressed by this, the Product Innovation team rolled up their sleeves and implemented an MVP as a browser extension in a matter of a couple of weeks, that sat alongside the Quantexa UI and fed the data and insights surfaced by Quantexa to an LLM, allowing the user to ask questions, generate summaries or reports, and choose from a library of pre-defined prompts using the Prompt Gallery.

Equipped with the MVP, we started engaging with our stakeholders internally and together we planned a series of validation and feedback gathering steps with our customers and partners. Numerous demos and conversations with potential users later, we had a clear understanding of the potential use cases, the challenges, and the benefits of Q Assist, which then allowed our colleagues in engineering, product management, design, and marketing to plan the next phase of development for Q Assist, ensuring we have a robust product, engineering, and GTM strategy for a successful release of Q Assist as a core feature of our platform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ2HUJDELCw

Crucially, we stayed close to our customers and partners throughout this process, as we believe innovation must be market oriented in order to be successful, and see co-innovation with customers and partners as a core tenet of how Q Labs operates.

In addition to the many validation sessions with our customers, we launched a lighthouse program in June of last year to work very closely with clients such as HSBC and BNY in order to ensure we build Q Assist in such a way that makes a significant impact on the value they get from Quantexa and ultimately drive tangible efficiency and effectiveness gains for their organisations.

What's Next

This all brings us to QuanCon 2025, where we’re making a major announcement around Q Assist as a core product capability, so please make sure you tune in to QuanCon as we won’t be stealing their thunder here!

Lessons Learnt

Looking back, we identify several factors that made Q Assist a successful innovation project, which are worth sharing with other innovation teams out there:

• Look for good ideas everywhere: Good ideas can be found practically everywhere, and innovators can catch them if they keep an open mind and widen their exposure.
• Effective prototyping is your best friend: Rather than spending months building prototypes, sometimes it’s much more effective to spend weeks building a working prototype, and months validating it with potential users and customers.
• Close collaboration with customers and partners from an early stage: Innovation can be much more effective if it’s done collaboratively with clients who have a need for your idea. Don’t be embarrassed to share your prototypes or concepts early– the startup mantra of “if you’re not embarrassed by your first release, you’ve waited for too long” applies to innovative efforts in larger companies too. In fact, this is what encouraged us to set up Q Labs as an innovation identity for Quantexa.
• Internal alignment across innovation, product, and GTM teams is crucial for ensuring a continuous and smooth transition from innovation prototypes to robust production implementations.
• Support from senior leadership is also crucial for ensuring innovation projects can move at pace, and not be slowed down by internal processes.

Get in Touch

If you are an innovator or work as part of an innovation team, we would love to hear about your experience and learnings, so please feel free to comment below or reach out to us.

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