Amazon follows Microsoft and Google with AI tools in Amazon Machine Learning service

Amazon becomes the latest cloud service to offer AI tools to enable machine learning and automated decision making

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched an artificial intelligence powered predictive-analytics service intended to help organisations improve the quality of their data-driven decision making.

The announcement comes after Microsoft launched Microsoft Delve, a machine learning based tool for Office 365 that, it said, was designed to "to help people discover relevant documents, conversations and connections".

Google also offers a number of machine-learning algorithms to analyse data and predict future outcomes. General Electric vice president of global software service William Ruh, for example, recently told Computing how the firm is examining the potential of artificial intelligence based tools.

The Amazon Machine Learning service, launched during a keynote speech at the AWS Summit in San Francisco, California is designed to analyse large amounts of big data then make predictions about information stored in AWS cloud. Amazon claimed that the tool is so simple to use that almost anybody can use it in order to make detailed, accurate predictions.

"Amazon has a long legacy in machine learning. It powers the product recommendations customers receive on Amazon.com, it is what makes Amazon Echo able to respond to your voice, and it is what allows us to unload an entire truck full of products and make them available for purchase in as little as 30 minutes," said Jeff Bilger, senior manager for Amazon Machine Learning.

Bilger went onto describe how Amazon realised that in order to provide AWS customers with the best service, Amazon Machine Learning needed to be offered to all those organisations which use the firm's cloud and database services.

"Early on, we recognized that the potential of machine learning could only be realized if we made it accessible to every developer across Amazon," he said.

"Amazon Machine Learning is the result of everything we've learned in the process of enabling thousands of Amazon developers to quickly build models, experiment, and then scale to power planet-scale predictive applications," Bilger added.

According to Amazon, the machine learning service will allow developers to visualize the statistical properties of the datasets that will be used to "train" the model to find patterns in the data. Amazon Machine Learning then uses the ‘training' to optimise algorithms in order to use data in order to return the best possible predictive models.

The idea is that from that point, developers can generate batches from Amazon Machine Learning without having to build and maintain further infrastructure in order to do so.

Amazon believe the artificial intelligence service can bring improvements to organisations in many tasks including detecting problematic transactions, preventing customer churn, and improving customer support.

One organisation which has already deployed Amazon Machine Learning is US media company Comcast Corporation, which runs Comcast Cable and the NBC Universal television network. Jan Neumann, manager of the data science research team at Comcast described what made the service so appealing.

"We evaluated Amazon Machine Learning and found it to be a compelling offering for our data science analytics. We particularly liked the ability to visually explore the trade-off between parameter settings and classification performance during the evaluation," he said.

"With Amazon Machine Learning it was quite simple to prepare and clean the input data and train a model on large data sets in short order," Neumann concluded.

Competition is growing in the machine learning space, with Amazon, Google and Microsoft now all offering customers artificially intelligence based tools. Indeed, speaking at the corporation's Convergence conference last month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argued that businesses are keen to harness the powers of new technologies.

"Businesses are hungry to seize new opportunities using technologies like machine learning and predictive analytics," he said.

"Only when businesses create a culture that empowers everyone to have access to data and insight that drive action will they be positioned to truly transform," Nadella added.

However, while speaking at a recent Computing roundtable event, Watchfinder IT director Jonathan Gil described how it's still sometimes difficult to sell the idea of machine learning to C level executives.

"If you say to people ‘there's this whole machine learning thing' all they're thinking is Terminator. As soon as you say ‘artificial intelligence' they say ‘I don't want a computer making decisions for me," he said.