Amazon is spending billions on deploying engineers into customers looking to get started with AI

• AWS wants to help customers deploy agentic AI at scale
• New FDE organization backed by $1 billion in AWS funding
• BMW and Lyft are early success stories

Amazon Web Services has announced plans to spend $1 billion deploying engineers in customer workplaces to help them build and deploy their own AI systems.

The dedicated AWS Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization focuses on getting organizations up and running with agentic AI quickly before making customers self-sufficient so that engineers can depart at the end of the project.

Frontier AI VP Francessca Vasquez explained many of the engineers are already behind many of AWS' own AI services, hinting at the expertise that customers can get access to.

AWS to forward-deploy engineers to speed up AI rollout

"Along with agentic systems running in their own AWS environment, they gain lasting AI skills, workflows, and patterns they can use to innovate independently," Vasquez wrote.

FDEs will collaborate with business leaders, engineering teams, security teams and other relevant workers to build AI systems and integrate AI agents into existing infrastructure, rather than just provide no-action consultancy services.

The project marks the next stages of artificial intelligence, focusing on agentic AI rather than generative AI. Customers who sign up to the program will get to explore automation tools, autonomous AI and industry-specific applications rather than just basic chatbots.

Amazon says it's doing this because access to models and model capability are no longer barriers to adoption – instead, organizations are struggling to actually implement them at scale.

Prior to the creation of this FDE organization, Amazon's engineers had already been deployed to BMW where they reduced service disruptions across 23 million connected vehicles, and to Lyft where they helped resolve driver support issues 87% faster.

The Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, the NBA, the NFL, Ricoh and Southwest Airlines are already early customers for the new FDE team.