What does it take to build a foundation model that can forecast demand for hundreds of millions of products — including ones that have never been sold before?

At Amazon, our Demand Forecasting team is tackling one of the most ambitious challenges in applied time series research: building large-scale foundation models that generalize across an enormous and diverse catalog of products, geographies, and business contexts. This is not incremental modeling work. We are redefining what's possible in demand forecasting.

Our team operates at a scale that is unmatched in industry. We run experiments across millions of products simultaneously, pushing the boundaries of what foundation models can learn from vast, heterogeneous time series data. We are also exploring novel data generation techniques that augment our already unprecedented dataset — opening new frontiers in model generalization and forecasting for products with limited or no sales history.

The models you b...