Press release
AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon Forecast
Amazon Forecast enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning technology used by
Puget Sound Energy,
Forecasting is the science of predicting the future. By examining historical trends, organizations can make a call on what might happen and when, and build that into their future plans for everything from product demand to inventory to staffing. Given the consequences of forecasting, accuracy really matters. If a forecast is too high, customers will over-invest in products and staff, which ends up as wasted investment, and if the forecast is too low, they will under-invest, which leads to a shortfall in raw materials and inventory; creating a poor customer experience. Today, companies try to use everything from simple spreadsheets to complex financial planning software to generate forecasts, but high accuracy remains elusive for two reasons. First, traditional forecasts struggle to incorporate very large volumes of historical data, missing out on important signals from the past that are lost in the noise. Second, traditional forecasts rarely incorporate related but independent data, which can offer important context (such as sales, holidays, locations, marketing promotions, etc.). Without the full history and the broader context, most forecasts fail to predict the future accurately.
Today’s general availability of Amazon Forecast provides a major step toward putting the power of Amazon’s deep experience in forecasting into the hands of everyday developers in virtually every industry. Amazon Forecast produces private, custom models that can help developers make predictions that are up to 50% more accurate than traditional methods. Using machine learning, Amazon Forecast automatically discovers how variables such as product features, seasonality, and store locations affect each other. These complex relationships can be difficult to spot using traditional forecasting methods, but Amazon Forecast uses the machine learning developed at
“Amazon Forecast now offers the forecasting expertise from Amazon’s first 25 years of building the world’s largest ecommerce business in a managed service for any company to leverage,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Amazon Machine Learning. “We’ve built sophisticated, machine learning forecasting algorithms over many years that our customers can now use in Amazon Forecast without having to know anything about machine learning themselves. We can’t wait to see how our customers use the service to reduce operating expenses and inefficiencies, ensure higher resource and product availability, deliver products faster, and lower costs to delight their customers.”
Amazon Forecast is available today in US East (
Puget Sound Energy (PSE) is the state’s largest utility, supporting 1.1 million electric customers and 825,000 natural gas customers in communities in 10 Washington counties. “At PSE, we’ve used Amazon Forecast to forecast electric and gas consumption at a typical residence. We found that even with a very limited set of historical consumption and weather data, Amazon Forecast performed very well at forecasting 30 days out with virtually no manual effort. With the increased emphasis on environmentally-friendly energy solutions, the ability to produce more accurate energy usage projections at each of our customers’ homes and businesses will be essential for energy service providers like PSE. With these enhanced analytical capabilities, PSE will be able to identify custom energy saving programs and services, ultimately reducing customer bills,” said
OMOTOR helps businesses improve through AI by providing them with the best of machine learning algorithms, computer vision techniques and cognitive bots that can communicate via WhatsApp and others platforms. "At OMOTOR, we use AI to innovate on behalf of our customers, so access to the most cutting-edge deep learning technologies from AWS is imperative to our client's success. Using Amazon Forecast gives us the ability to create and refine various forecasts from time series data without having to build and train a model manually every time. We forecast real sales for the next 12 months, so we can adequately plan for inventory, estimate future profitability, track market share gain or loss, and other insights. This means we can use more contextual data, optimize more frequently, generate forecasts with upwards of 50% improvements in accuracy, and operate at a great speed. For example, we're helping customers in the automotive industry predict sales across 185 vehicles in Brazil,” said
Daemon Solutions is a consultancy helping clients get the most out of technology in business. “One of the most common challenges facing our retail partners is the ability to accurately predict product demand across different SKUs and store locations. Given the ease with which we have been able to use Amazon Forecast to create advanced ML models that meet the accuracy bar when it comes to forecasting as well as account for variables such as promotions and price with our test data sets, we are excited to deploy the service on behalf of our clients and solve real-life problems,” said
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For 13 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 165 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI),
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Amazon.com, Inc.
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