Amazon Web Services is the world's biggest cloud company. But its customers say they want AI help faster than remote services can provide. That is why AWS is investing $1 billion to send its own engineers to work inside customer offices.
Forward deployed engineers (FDEs) are AWS employees who work on site at a customer's location.
Francessca Vasquez, AWS vice president for frontier AI engineering and services, stated that the unit unifies previous separate functions into a single structure. "It's the first time we're doing it in that way," she said.
Customers are pushing for speed. "The currency that the customers are always talking about right now is speed," Vasquez added.
OpenAI teamed up with TPG, Advent International, Bain Capital, and Brookfield Asset Management. Anthropic partnered with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs.
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Given the competitive landscape and the unique needs of regulated industries, AWS's $1 billion commitment signals a strategic pivot from solely providing cloud infrastructure to offering deep, on-the-ground integration support. This could help the company retain and expand its customer base among large enterprises that require both cloud scale and localized expertise.
Vasquez said AWS has offered similar help in the past, but never as a single organized unit. "Structurally this is like getting everybody together in one business unit with a common rubric of deployment," she said. The goal is to speed up how quickly customers can turn AI into real value. "We do see FDE being a choice for customers who are looking for accelerated value back to their stakeholders, their customers, their executive teams," Vasquez said.
According to an AWS blog post, the company's forward deployed engineers will collaborate intensively with customer business, engineering, and security teams, aiming to make clients' own staff self-reliant with new tools and capabilities within just a few weeks. The engineers will also work alongside AI agents.
This hands‑on approach is particularly appealing for industries like finance and healthcare, where sensitive data often cannot be processed in the cloud. By placing engineers directly at customer facilities, AWS can help clients navigate regulatory requirements while rapidly integrating AI into existing workflows.
Vasquez noted that customers such as the Allen Institute, the NBA, Ricoh, and the NFL are already employing AWS's forward deployed engineers. Vasquez said, "Companies in highly regulated industries with diverse datasets will be the next group of adopters." She added that "this is for customers that are really looking at ways to evolve their workflows."
A spokesperson for AWS said, "The company expects to have the opportunity to work with the FDE companies from OpenAI and Anthropic, and it will share more details about its partner programs in the near future."
AWS is betting that putting engineers on site will win over customers in regulated industries.
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