One of the open secrets of the business world is the fact that technology leaders like Amazon and Google are as nimble as they are because of the massive effort put into their own internal systems.
Amazon spent the first six years of its existence ploughing all revenue back into customer-relations systems. The strategy paid off, as Amazon's customer-management processes, recommendation engines and logistics became the foundation for one of the most powerful companies in the world.
Now Amazon is offering some of that intellectual property to its customers.
At the Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week, it unveiled three products designed to turn cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into a commodity.
Amazon Personalize aims to simplify both personalisation and recommendation. These functions were possible with an AI product launched last year, SageMaker, that used ML to create algorithms. However, it is complex, requiring expert developers and data scientists. Personalize automates ML tasks, reducing both the learning curve and time to deploy.
"For over 20 years, Amazon.com has built recommender systems at scale, integrating personalised recommendations across the buying experience," said Julien Simon, an AI and ML "evangelist" for Europe, Middle East and Africa. To help all AWS customers do the same, he said, Personalize is "a fully managed service that puts personalisation and recommendation in the hands of developers with little ML experience".
The second product, Amazon Forecast, leverages what is possibly Amazon's most powerful weapon, time series forecasting, to predict data such as weekly sales, daily inventory levels or hourly website traffic. From simple spreadsheets at one extreme to complex financial planning software at the other, this function is at the heart of sales growth.
"Such tools may try to predict the future sales of a raincoat by looking only at its previous sales data with the underlying assumption that the future is determined by the past," said AWS evangelist Danilo Poccia. "This approach can struggle to produce accurate forecasts for large sets of data that have irregular trends. Also, it fails to easily combine data series that change over time . with relevant independent variables like product features and store locations.
"Amazon Forecast packages our years of experience in building and operating scalable, highly accurate forecasting technology into an easy-to-use and fully managed service."
Finally, Amazon Textract is a service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents. It goes beyond simple optical character recognition to identify the contents of forms and tables.
"Most of the world's knowledge is still locked in documents," said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, during his keynote address at re:Invent.
The new products, he said, made up "a set of new AI services that allow you to be even more effective in everyday activities".
In effect, Amazon is unlocking the vault where its own secret weapons are kept.
• Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram on @art2gee..