Amazon Forecast hits general availability

The ability to forecast events at scale, given a set of variables, is something most companies would find useful. So Amazon is aiming to make prediction more accessible with a fully managed service called Forecast that uses AI and machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts. As Amazon explained in a press release, Forecast -- which is based on the same technology the Seattle company uses to anticipate demand for hundreds of millions of products every day -- can be used to build precise forecasts for virtually any business condition, including product demand and sales, infrastructure requirements, energy needs, and staffing levels. It automatically provisions the necessary cloud infrastructure and processes data, building custom AI models hosted on AWS without requiring an ounce of machine learning experience on the part of developers. Amazon says the API or a console allows the average person to build custom machine learning models in less than five clicks and achieve accuracy levels that would normally take months in as little as a few hours.