Amazon Web Services said on Tuesday it will invest an initial $1 billion to create a new global engineering division that embeds artificial intelligence specialists inside customer organisations, as the cloud provider seeks to accelerate enterprise AI adoption and expand its professional services capabilities.
The new Forward Deployed Engineering unit will send teams of five or six engineers to work alongside customers for around 45 days, helping them build and deploy production AI systems. AWS said it expects the division to employ thousands of staff, recruiting externally while transferring some employees internally, despite Amazon having cut more than 30,000 corporate jobs since October, according to Reuters.
Francessca Vasquez, AWS vice president of frontier AI engineering and services, told Reuters: “We have a ton of demand for customers who are asking for our help to really drive agentic AI patterns in their workflows.” She said the company would measure success by how quickly customers could develop new products or capabilities, adding: “We want to make sure that these customers get value in faster durations than what they’ve traditionally seen in project-based activity.”
AWS is joining a growing market for so-called forward-deployed engineers, in which software companies place technical staff inside customer organisations to accelerate AI deployment. The model was pioneered by Palantir Technologies and has recently been adopted by companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Cloud, while AWS describes itself as the first hyperscale cloud provider to launch a dedicated organisation of this kind.
Vasquez said that the initiative brings together existing capabilities into a single business unit with a common deployment model. “It’s the first time we’re doing it in that way,” she said, adding that customers increasingly value speed when implementing AI systems. AWS said engineers will work alongside AI agents and customer business, engineering and security teams before leaving organisations with the skills to continue development independently.
AWS announced the investment during its customer summit in Washington, where it is expected to unveil further public sector cloud initiatives. Initial customers include the National Basketball Association, Ricoh, the National Football League and the Allen Institute, while the company said regulated industries are likely to be among the next adopters.
Industry demand for the role has accelerated rapidly. Reuters cited LinkedIn research showing demand for forward-deployed engineers and similar positions increased 42-fold between 2023 and 2025, while Box chief executive Aaron Levie wrote in May that the role is “about to become one of the most in-demand jobs in tech.”
