AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon Personalize

Amazon Personalize enables developers to build applications with the
same machine learning technology used by Amazon.com for real-time
personalized recommendations – with no machine learning expertise
required

Yamaha, Subway, and Zola among customers using Amazon Personalize

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#AWS–Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com
company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon
Personalize, bringing the same machine learning technology used by
Amazon.com to AWS customers for use in their applications – with no
machine learning experience required. Amazon Personalize makes it easy
to develop applications with a wide array of personalization use cases,
including specific product recommendations, individualized search
results, and customized direct marketing. Amazon Personalize is a fully
managed service that trains, tunes, and deploys custom, private machine
learning models. Amazon Personalize provisions the necessary
infrastructure and manages the entire machine learning pipeline,
including processing the data, identifying features, selecting
algorithms, and training, optimizing, and hosting the results. Customers
receive results via an Application Programming Interface (API) and only
pay for what they use, with no minimum fees or upfront commitments. To
get started with Amazon Personalize, visit https://aws.amazon.com/personalize/

Amazon has pioneered the use of machine learning for recommendation and
personalization for more than 20 years. During that time, customers have
asked for access to these capabilities so they could enjoy similar
benefits when running their businesses. However, the technology can be
challenging to deliver effectively across a variety of use cases because
there isn’t a single, master personalization algorithm. Each use case –
videos, music, products, or news articles – has its own specificities,
which requires a unique mix of data, algorithms, and optimizations to
create a result. Today’s general availability of Amazon Personalize
provides a major step toward putting the power of Amazon’s experience in
machine learning into the hands of everyday application developers and
data scientists at businesses of all sizes across all industries. Amazon
Personalize reduces the time to build a custom model from months to
days. When using Amazon Personalize, customers provide the service an
activity stream from an application (e.g. page views, signups, or
purchases) along with an inventory of the items to recommend (e.g.
music, videos, products, or news articles), and receive recommendations
via an API. Amazon Personalize does this by processing and examining the
data, identifying what is meaningful, selecting from multiple advanced
algorithms built and refined over years for Amazon’s retail business,
and training and optimizing a personalization model customized to the
data. During the whole time, all of the data is kept completely private,
owned entirely by the customer.

“We are excited to share with AWS customers the expertise we’ve
developed during two decades of using machine learning to deliver great
experiences on Amazon.com,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President
of Machine Learning, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Customers have been
asking for Amazon Personalize, and we are eager to see how they
implement these services to delight their own end users. And the best
part is that these artificial intelligence services, like Amazon
Personalize, do not require any machine learning experience to
immediately train, tune, and deploy models to meet their business
demands.”

Amazon Personalize is available today in US East (Ohio), US East (N.
Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific
(Singapore) and EU (Ireland) with additional regions coming soon.

Yamaha Corporation of America (YCA) offers a large assortment of
high-quality musical instruments and audio products to U.S. customers.
Their products include Keyboard, Guitar, Winds and Strings, Percussion,
Professional Audio and Consumer Audio. “Amazon Personalize saves us up
to 60% of the time needed to set up and tune the infrastructure and
algorithms for our machine learning models when compared to building and
configuring the environment on our own. It is ideal for both small
developer teams who are trying to build the case for ML and large teams
who are trying to iterate rapidly at reasonable cost. Even better, we
expect Amazon Personalize to be more accurate than other recommender
systems, allowing us to delight our customers with highly personalized
product suggestions during their shopping experience, which we believe
will increase our average order value and the total number of orders,”
said Ishwar Bharbhari, Director of Information Technology, Yamaha
Corporation of America.

The Subway restaurant chain offers guests in over 100 countries quality
ingredients and flavor combinations with nearly 7 million made-to-order
sandwiches created daily. “At Subway, guest experience matters,” said
Neville Hamilton, Interim Chief Information Officer at Subway. “Using
Amazon Personalize, we can quickly deliver personalized recommendations
for our endless varieties of ingredients and flavors to fit the unique
lifestyles of our busy guests. Amazon Personalize lets our team use
simple API calls to curate recommendations without requiring machine
learning expertise. We are looking forward to continuing to work with
Amazon Personalize to provide the best experience to our guests who want
to eat fresh. We have already successfully tested using Amazon
Personalize to provide recommendations to guests making orders from our
app, and are excited to expand into personalized app notifications in
the near future.”

Zola is the fastest-growing wedding company in the country using design
and technology to create the easiest wedding planning and registry
experience for couples. “At Zola, we develop innovative wedding planning
tools. We want to be there along the entire wedding journey and provide
the best possible recommendations to our customers based on their style,
interests, or preferences. Until now, those recommendations have been
implemented via rule-based ranking, popularity, or more recently, via a
similarity model calculated internally. These methods were difficult to
maintain and scale. Amazon Personalize provides us with state-of-the-art
algorithms and an end-to-end personalization solution that enables us to
provide recommendations and personalized content in real time. Being a
small team, using Amazon Personalize will allow us to quickly deliver
capabilities that would have otherwise taken a much larger team and
several months development time,” said Stephane Bailliez, Vice President
of Engineering at Zola.

Segment provides customer data infrastructure allowing companies to
collect, unify, and connect their first-party customer data to over 200
marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools with just a flip of a
switch. “Today’s consumers expect real-time personalization and
recommendations, yet the reality for most companies is that the amount
of engineering required makes that experience very hard to create, let
alone deliver,” said Tom Pinckney, Head of Partnerships at Segment.
“Amazon Personalize brings Amazon’s world-class machine learning
technology to every company. By combining it with Segment’s Customer
Data Infrastructure, our customers can deliver these highly
individualized recommendations at scale and in real time. We have been
impressed and plan to extend its functionality for Segment with further
integration in the future.”

About Amazon Web Services

For almost 13 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 165
fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking,
analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence
(AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and
augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development,
deployment, and management from 66 Availability Zones (AZs) within 21
geographic regions, spanning the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China,
France, Germany, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, India,
Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, and the UK. Millions of
customers including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises,
and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure,
become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than
competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational
excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping,
personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle
Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa
are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more
information, visit amazon.com/about
and follow @AmazonNews.

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