Machine Learning - eBook (EN)

you have, to solve the problem at hand. Q: What kind of culture do organizations need to succeed with ML? Lee: Machine learning requires a cultural shift that's most successfully driven from the top. As a leader, it's important to articulate the priority of machine learning to the company and to encourage team members to continually ask themselves whether a business problem might be better solved with machine learning. Again, not every business problem is best solved by machine learning. But constantly asking that question is critical. Ten years ago, the Amazon leadership team asked every business leader at Amazon — regardless of whether they were running a research team, a fulfillment center, an HR organization, or the legal department — how they planned to leverage machine learning in their business. "We don't plan to" was not an acceptable answer. This forced every part of the organization to think about how ML could improve some aspect of their business and to develop a plan to achieve it. Today, I would say there's not a single business function at Amazon that isn't made better through machine learning. But this didn't happen overnight. It took a cultural and a technological shift. Q: What else would you like business leaders to know about ML? Lee: Machine learning is still in its infancy, but it's not entirely new. Still, the path to machine learning success is not always straightforward, so many organizations need a partner to help them along the journey. We have successfully helped so many organizations, from Domino's Pizza, to the NFL, Cerner, and NASA, achieve machine learning successes. While we always aim to help our customers identify and deploy their high-value ML use cases, our goal is also to teach our customers "how to fish." To this end, we offer a program called AWS Machine Learning Embark, which not only provides workshops and ideation sessions to help identify their best use cases, but also machine learning training for both technical and business leaders for the precise reason I mentioned earlier: You want people within your organization, at every level, to be thinking, "How might machine learning improve or solve the business problem at hand?" SPONSOR'S VIEWPOINT • 24 "As a leader, it's important to articulate the priority of machine learning to the company and to encourage team members to continually ask themselves whether a business problem might be better solved with machine learning. Again, not every business problem is best solved by machine learning. But constantly asking that question is critical." ABOUT AWS AWS offers a broad and deep set of machine learning and AI services for your business. On behalf of our customers, we are focused on solving some of the toughest challenges that hold back machine learning from being in the hands of every developer. You can choose from pretrained AI services for computer vision, language, recommendations, and forecasting, or Amazon SageMaker to quickly build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale. Customers can also build custom models with support for all the popular open-source frameworks. Our capabilities are built on the most comprehensive cloud platform, optimized for machine learning with high-performance compute and no compromises on security and analytics. Learn more at aws.ai.

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