Microsoft and AWS deploy thousands of engineers to make artificial intelligence profitable

Faced with the difficulty in achieving concrete results with artificial intelligence, two cloud computing giants, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, have decided to take an unprecedented step: to send thousands of their own engineers directly to client companies to accelerate the actual adoption of AI.

According to AFP, Microsoft announced on Thursday the creation of the Microsoft Frontier Company, a new unit backed by an investment of $2.5 billion that will bring together 6,000 experts and engineers. The goal is to work side by side with companies to transform their operations using artificial intelligence.

Just two days earlier, AWS, the global leader in cloud services, had unveiled a similar initiative: allocating $1 billion to its Forward Deployed Engineering program, which will also send thousands of engineers to its clients’ facilities.

Speed, yes — but with a clear strategy

"The currency that the customers are always talking about right now is speed," said Francessca Vasquez, vice president of Frontier AI Engineering and Services at AWS. 

For his part, Sri Elaprolu, director of the GenAI Innovation Center at AWS, told AFP that the key is to resist the temptation to start with the technology. "Just because someone is excited about agentic AI doesn't mean agentic AI is the right answer," he said. "The wrong way of going about it is forcing a technology into a problem versus working backwards to define what's the right steps to get there."

 Following the trend of AI labs

With these initiatives, Microsoft and AWS are following in the footsteps of San Francisco’s leading AI labs. OpenAI and Anthropic have already begun sending teams of engineers to the headquarters of their most important clients, in partnership with major investment funds.

This strategy is also reminiscent of the pioneering model of Palantir, which began embedding its specialists within organizations more than a decade ago.

Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business, noted that the new unit will combine internal talent with external hires of "world-class engineers" who have developed and fine-tuned large language models directly with clients.