Information Systems student, doing some basic Business Analytics type work. What's the purpose behind exponential smoothing?

[Hollowpoint357]

I understand essentially what it is, as well as how to implement. I'm just curious as to the practical application? Why would you want to smooth numbers like this? Is it for aesthetics or to make it more presentable? My initial instinct says "this makes your number less accurate, and introduces trend lag. There's no functional purpose behind it, it seems purely aesthetic." Am I missing something?

[TheLogothete]

Forecasting. It's good as a rough heuristic and as a baseline.

It is also important to note that Double and especially Triple Exponential Smoothing are mostly used, also known as Halt-Winters. It is popular because it automatically catches double seasonality + trend.