As businesses continue to struggle with integrating artificial intelligence, many are increasingly looking for external support—and service providers are stepping up with new specialized teams to fill that need. On Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced a fresh internal unit dedicated to AI-focused forward-deployed engineers. These engineers will work directly within client organizations to build and deploy custom AI agents, with an emphasis on rapid project turnaround and enabling customers to become self-sufficient.

Francessca Vasquez, AWS Vice President of Frontier AI, explained in an announcement that the new team’s mission goes beyond simply creating and maintaining requested systems. "Customers leave AWS FDE deployments with both new solutions and new engineering capabilities," the announcement stated. "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 has committed $1 billion to this initiative, though this figure represents internal Amazon resources rather than a joint venture or traditional investment. The forward-deployed engineer (FDE) model, originally pioneered by Palantir, has gained traction as a practical approach to managing AI rollouts. In a typical FDE arrangement, an engineer from the contracting company—in this case, AWS—works on-site with the client during the system’s setup phase. This allows them to respond directly to emerging opportunities or challenges as they arise.

The FDE model enables much of the underlying technology to be reused across different deployments, while still being customized to each company’s unique needs and workflows. It also provides the client with a surge of expertise and places primary responsibility for the deployment on the contractor. The main drawback is the significant labor required, as it means maintaining a full team of FDE engineers to install and support the technology.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have launched their own FDE joint ventures in recent months, valued at $4 billion and $1.5 billion, respectively. In those cases, the AI labs partnered with private equity firms, which provided both the capital to get started and connections with client companies within their portfolios.