Amazon Web Services plans $1 billion push to embed “forward deployed” AI engineers with customers

Amazon Web Services is planning a major expansion of its hands-on AI help for enterprise customers, committing $1 billion to a new Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) effort focused on “agentic AI” projects.

In an announcement published today, AWS said the new organization will embed thousands of experts directly with customers. The aim is to co-develop and deploy agentic AI solutions quickly, compressing timelines “from months to days,” according to AWS.

The company described agentic AI as systems that can carry out tasks through some level of automated decision-making and action. AWS said the program uses this approach to build “agentic solutions” and to emphasize business outcomes rather than technology pilots that stall after initial trials.

AWS positioned the model as a fast path to deployment while still leaving customers “self-sufficient with AI.” That is, AWS said FDE teams will help deliver working systems and expertise that customers can continue to run and adapt themselves after the initial engagement.

AWS also said customers worldwide are already working with Forward Deployed Engineering teams. Named examples include the Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, the NBA, the NFL, Ricoh, and Southwest Airlines, each of which AWS said is collaborating with FDE to develop and deploy AI capabilities on AWS.

The announcement was delivered by Francessca Vasquez, Vice President of Frontier AI Engineering and Services at AWS. AWS framed the effort as part of a broader strategy to move AI from experimentation to operational use, by deploying expert teams at the customer site or within the customer’s delivery process.

FDE is not a new AWS concept, but AWS’s update is notable for the explicit funding scale and for its specific focus on agentic AI deployments. The company’s message suggests it is trying to systematize how enterprises translate AI roadmaps into real production applications.

The new effort’s $1 billion figure was presented as an AWS investment, but the company did not spell out how the money will be allocated across roles, geographies, or specific customer engagements in the announcement text. AWS also did not provide detailed staffing plans, service-level commitments, or timelines for when the organization will reach full capacity.

Looking ahead, the most immediate thing to watch is whether AWS will publish further details on how customers access FDE teams, what kinds of agentic use cases the organization prioritizes, and what deployment metrics it uses to define success. With enterprises increasingly pressured to demonstrate AI ROI quickly, AWS’s bet appears to be that embedded delivery expertise can shorten the path from prototype to production.