As companies struggle to integrate AI, they’re increasingly ready to bring in outside help — and service providers are launching new purpose-built groups to make sure they get it.
On Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched a new internal organization for AI-focused forward-deployed engineers. Engineers on the new team will embed within companies to deploy purpose-built agents, focusing on fast engagements and customer self-sufficiency.
In a post announcing the new org, AWS VP of Frontier AI Francessca Vasquez emphasized that the org would do more than build and maintain requested systems. “Customers leave AWS FDE deployments with both new solutions and new engineering capabilities,” the announcement reads. “Along with agentic systems running in their own AWS environment, they gain lasting AI skills, workflows, and patterns they can use to innovate independently.”
Amazon says $1 billion will be committed to the new org, although the figure represents internal Amazon resources rather than a joint venture or conventional investment.
Pioneered by Palantir, the forward-deployed engineer (FDE) model has become increasingly popular as a way to manage AI deployments. In a typical FDE system, an engineer from the contracting company (in this case, AWS) works for the client temporarily while the system is being established, allowing them to respond directly as internal opportunities or challenges emerge.
In the FDE model, much of the relevant technology can be reused between deployments, while still being tailored to the specifics of each company’s needs and workflows. It also gives the client company an influx of expertise and puts primary responsibility for the deployment in the hands of the contractor. The biggest downside is the labor involved, since it means maintaining a full corps of FDE engineers to install and maintain the company’s technology.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have launched their own FDE joint ventures in recent months, valued at 1.5 billion, respectively. In those two cases, the AI labs were paired with private equity firms, which provided both the capital to launch and connections with client corporations in their portfolios.
AWS Official Announcement (About Amazon)
Today, AWS announced creation of a dedicated AWS Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization. Backed by a $1 billion investment, the AWS FDE model is different in three key ways: it is agentic-first, it compresses timelines from months to days, and it is designed so customers are self-sufficient when a deployment ends.
AWS FDE embeds AWS frontier teams—working with purpose-built agents—directly inside customer teams. These experienced engineers, many of whom build AWS AI services, partner with a customer’s business, engineering, and security teams to build and deploy production AI systems with their data, governance, and processes.
Unlike traditional consulting that assesses, recommends, and treats each deployment as a standalone project, AWS FDE builds for the long term. Deployments are structured around shared goals and business results, not billable hours.
AWS FDE uses agentic deployment technology and the AI-Driven Development Lifecycle—a new approach to software development that emphasizes AI-powered execution with human oversight and dynamic team collaboration.
Customer self-sufficiency is designed into AWS FDE engagements. As projects advance, customer engineers move from observers to co-builders to autonomous operators. Customers gain deployed systems, knowledge graphs, runbooks, architectural documentation, and trained internal champions ready to operate independently.
At the heart of this is a semantic layer that FDE teams deploy into the customer’s own AWS account. It connects to enterprise data sources, enriches metadata, and uses AI to publish a governed, versioned knowledge graph. Agents reason over that knowledge graph, so domain expertise lives in the customer’s code, not in institutional knowledge that could rotate off.
Security is built in from the start: hardware-based isolation, end-to-end encryption, and customer data that never leaves the customer’s governance framework.
AWS FDEs are already embedded and working with customers such as the Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, the NBA, Ricoh, Southwest Airlines, and the NFL.
Gary Brantley, CIO of the National Football League: “To create new digital experiences for our fans, the NFL partnered with AWS FDE and got engineers building alongside our team to launch into production in just weeks. Together, we created new fan-facing products like NFL Fantasy AI and NFL IQ that allow fans to interact with NFL data like never before.”
AWS FDE is built for organizations that have moved past experimentation and need production AI systems running real business processes—particularly in regulated industries, financial services, and government, where security, governance, and speed to production are non-negotiable.