AWS drops 1 billion into an AI unit that embeds engineers with customers

[Shane96]

AWS is putting a billion dollars into a new AI unit built around forward deployed engineers who embed directly with customers. The stated goal is to leave behind self sufficient teams with new AI solutions and capabilities in a matter of weeks. It joins a growing wave of vendors doing the embed your engineers model

The forward deployed engineer idea is not new, Palantir made it famous, but seeing AWS put a billion behind it signals the model is going mainstream for AI deployment. The bottleneck for enterprise AI is rarely the model, it is the integration into messy real world systems. Human engineers on site is a very unsexy but effective answer

This fits the broader theme that AI is entering a harder more physical phase. The easy demo is over and the money is now in actually making these systems work inside real companies with real legacy infrastructure. That is grunt work and it does not scale like software, which is why it costs a billion

My take is that this is AWS admitting that self serve AI tooling only gets enterprises so far. The last mile of getting value out of AI needs people who understand both the tech and the customer mess. It is a smart moat too, because embedded relationships are sticky in a way API access is not

AWS puts $1 billion into new AI unit to embed engineers with customers, joining growing wavewww.cnbc.com