Amazon Web Services is investing $1bn (£754m) in a new division that will embed AI engineers directly with customers to help them deploy artificial intelligence systems faster.
The company said its new Forward Deployed Engineering organisation will send small teams of engineers into customer businesses to co-develop and launch agentic AI tools.
Reuters reported that AWS plans to send five to six-person engineering pods to customers for 45-day periods, with the aim of helping businesses move AI projects beyond pilots and into live operations.
The unit will sit within AWS and employ “thousands” of workers, with some roles filled through external hiring and others moved from within Amazon.
AWS vice president of frontier AI engineering and services Francessca Vasquez said there was strong customer demand for support in applying agentic AI to business workflows.
The engineers will work alongside customers’ business, engineering and security teams to build production-ready AI systems using their own data, governance and processes.
AWS said the model was designed to cut deployment timelines from months to days, while leaving customers with the skills, documentation and systems needed to operate independently once the project ends.
The company said customers already working with AWS FDE teams include the NBA, NFL, Ricoh, Southwest Airlines, Cox Automotive and the Allen Institute.
AWS said the new unit will focus on customers that have moved beyond experimentation and need production AI systems running core business processes, particularly in sectors where security and governance are critical.
The launch follows growing interest in forward-deployed engineering across the technology sector, a model long associated with Palantir and increasingly adopted by AI firms seeking to drive enterprise take-up.
the investment comes after Amazon has cut more than 30,000 corporate jobs since October. AI-related engineering roles have become a rare growth area within the wider technology jobs market.
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