I've worked on systems for consumer goods/products companies and one thing that's consistently come up is the need to do demand planning and some forward lookin

I've worked on systems for consumer goods/products companies and one thing that's consistently come up is the need to do demand planning and some forward looking sales analytics. In a number of cases we needed to do analysis based on product mix/category, consumer profiles (age, gender, color preferences, etc), or even geographic weather events that might influence sales spikes. We had humans doing this full time at the places where I worked. This has always felt like the kind of task that would be perfect for ML-type systems/algorithms, but I haven't figured out a good way to mentally map the problem space onto ML because I'm just not super familiar with the ML topics and, as I mentioned, the mathematics has always turned me off.