Amazon on Wednesday announced the Amazon ML Solutions Lab, a new program that connects Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers with Amazon's own machine learning experts. Through boot camps, workshops, advisory professional services and other forms of programming, the program is designed to help Amazon's cloud customers figure out how to leverage machine learning. Competing cloud providers, from Microsoftto Oracle, have for some time touted their capabilities in AI and machine learning as a key value proposition as they try to make a dent in Amazon's market dominance. Amazon's response has been to point to its own internal use of machine learning. "Amazon has been investing in machine learning for more than 20 years, innovating in areas such as fulfilment and logistics, personalization and recommendations, forecasting, fraud prevention, and supply chain optimization," Vinayak Agarwal, a senior product manager for AWS Deep Learning, wrote in a blog post about the new service.

Amazon announced today that it's making the machine learning courses it uses to train its engineers available to everybody for free. The coursework is tailored to four major groups -- developers, data scientists, data platform engineers and business professionals -- and it offers both foundational level lessons as well as more advanced instruction. "Each course starts with the fundamentals, and builds on those through real-world examples and labs, allowing developers to explore machine learning through some fun problems we have had to solve at Amazon," Amazon said in the announcement. "Coursework helps consolidate best practices, and demonstrates how to get started on a range of AWS machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, AWS DeepLens, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly and Amazon Comprehend." More than 30 courses totalling over 45 hours are available as are videos, labs and other relevant documentation initially developed for training Amazon employees.

The cloud is disrupting traditional operating models for IT departments and entire organizations. Amazon on Wednesday announced the Amazon ML Solutions Lab, a new program that connects Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers with Amazon's own machine learning experts. Through boot camps, workshops, advisory professional services, and other forms of programming, the program is designed to help Amazon's cloud customers figure out how to leverage machine learning. Competing cloud providers, from Microsoft to Oracle, have for some time touted their capabilities in AI and machine learning as a key value proposition as they try to make a dent in Amazon's market dominance. Amazon's response has been to point to its own internal use of machine learning.

With the emergence of Data Science as a Service, the commoditization of data science is near. However, executives and employees will need a fundamental understanding of data analytics.