As businesses struggle to integrate AI, they are increasingly prepared to bring in outside help, and service providers are launching new dedicated groups to ensure they have help.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday launched a new internal organization for forward deployment engineers focused on AI. The new team’s engineers will be embedded within the company, focusing on rapid response and customer self-sufficiency, and bringing in dedicated agents.
In a post announcing the new organization, Francessca Vasquez, vice president of Frontier AI at AWS, emphasized that the organization will do more than just build and maintain the required systems. “Customers will exit their AWS FDE deployments with both new solutions and new engineering capabilities,” the announcement reads. “By running agent systems in your own AWS environment, you gain permanent AI skills, workflows, and patterns that you can use for your own innovations.”
Amazon says it will invest $1 billion in the new organization, but that figure represents internal Amazon resources, not joint ventures or traditional investments.
The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, pioneered by Palantir, is an increasingly popular way to manage AI deployments. In a typical FDE system, engineers from a contracting company (in this case AWS) work temporarily for the client while the system is being built, allowing the client to respond directly to internal opportunities and challenges as they arise.
In the FDE model, much of the technology involved can be reused between deployments while being tailored to the specifics of each company’s needs and workflows. It also brings expertise to the client company and places primary responsibility for implementation in the hands of the contractor. The biggest drawback is the high labor costs. That’s because it means maintaining a full force of FDE engineers to install and maintain the company’s technology.
OpenAI and Anthropic have launched their own FDE joint ventures worth $4 billion and $1.5 billion, respectively, in recent months. In these two cases, AI Lab partnered with a private equity firm to provide both start-up capital and connections to customer companies in its portfolio.
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