Amazon AWS announced a $1 billion investment to create a dedicated AWS Forward Deployed Engineering organization. The new organization will embed AWS engineers directly with customer teams to co-develop and deploy agentic AI solutions.
AWS said the organization is designed to help customers move from AI experimentation to production systems that reshape business processes. The AWS Forward Deployed Engineering model focuses on three areas: using agentic AI first, compressing deployment timelines from months to days, and leaving customers self-sufficient after deployments end.
AWS FDE teams will embed AWS frontier teams directly inside customer organizations. These engineers will work with customer business, engineering, and security teams to build and deploy production AI systems using the customer’s data, governance, and processes.
AWS said many of the engineers involved have experience building AWS AI services. The company said the model differs from traditional consulting because it is designed around long-term capabilities rather than standalone projects.
Customers are expected to leave engagements with deployed AI systems as well as internal engineering skills, workflows, and reusable patterns. AWS said deployments will be structured around shared goals and business outcomes rather than billable hours.
The organization will use agentic deployment technology and an AI-Driven Development Lifecycle. This approach emphasizes AI-powered execution with human oversight and dynamic collaboration between customer teams and AWS engineers.
AWS said agents will accelerate each phase of the development lifecycle while human engineers verify and guide the work. AWS Partners are also expected to support FDE engagements by contributing model expertise, industry knowledge, and complementary skills.
AWS said it is investing in partner training, tools, and resources to support these engagements. Customer self-sufficiency is a key part of the FDE model.
As projects move forward, customer engineers are expected to progress from observers to co-builders to autonomous operators. Customers will receive deployed systems, knowledge graphs, runbooks, architectural documentation, and trained internal champions.
AWS said every engagement will produce codified expertise designed to continue delivering value after the engagement ends. The model also includes a semantic layer deployed into the customer’s AWS account.
That layer connects to enterprise data sources, enriches metadata, and uses AI to publish a governed and versioned knowledge graph. Agents then reason over that knowledge graph so domain expertise becomes embedded in the customer’s systems.
AWS said security is built into the model from the start through hardware-based isolation, end-to-end encryption, and customer data remaining within the customer’s governance framework. Customers already working with AWS FDE teams include the Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, the NBA, Ricoh, Southwest Airlines, and the NFL.
AWS said it has been building AI solutions with customers since 2017. Over the past three years, the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center’s engineers have worked on thousands of customer solutions.
Examples include work with BMW to reduce service disruptions across 23 million connected vehicles, Jabil to build a manufacturing assistant for factory floors, and Lyft to resolve driver support issues 87% faster. AWS said FDE is built for organizations that have moved beyond experimentation and need production AI systems running real business processes.
The company said the model is especially relevant for regulated industries, financial services, and government customers where security, governance, and speed to production are critical. Customers can contact their AWS account team to learn how AWS FDE can help them reach their AI goals.
KEY QUOTE:
“The NFL has millions of fans who want to consume football content throughout the year, including the offseason. We innovate at the pace and scale needed to meet the high expectations of our fans. To create new digital experiences for our fans, the NFL partnered with AWS FDE and got engineers building alongside our team to launch into production in just weeks. Together, we created new fan-facing products like NFL Fantasy AI and NFL IQ that allow fans to interact with NFL data like never before. The engagement from fans and broadcasters was measurable from day one and was made possible by AWS’s delivery model.”
Gary Brantley, Chief Information Officer of the National Football League
