Amazon is laying out $1 billion to follow Palantir's AI playbook

By Christine Ji

Amazon plans to utilize forward-deployed engineers to help corporate clients build agentic workflows

AWS is embedding thousands of its AI experts with major enterprise clients, including the NBA and Southwest Airlines.

Packages aren't the only thing Amazon.com is delivering: The company is now sending engineers directly to clients in order to bolster artificial-intelligence adoption.

On Tuesday, Amazon (AMZN) announced a $1 billion initiative to build out a forward-deployed engineer organization, which seeks to help customers quickly build and scale agentic AI solutions - systems where AI tools reason, plan and execute multistep tasks with limited human involvement.

Amazon Web Services will embed "thousands of experts with customers to co-develop and deploy agentic AI solutions in days," Francessca Vasquez, Amazon's vice president of frontier AI, shared in the press release. Amazon said it is already partnering with organizations like the NFL, the NBA and Southwest Airlines (LUV).

Forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs, work on site with clients to implement, develop and troubleshoot bespoke solutions. The role - initially popularized by Palantir Technologies (PLTR) - has gained traction in recent years as a companies aim to encourage AI adoption.

Many companies have struggled to integrate AI as they've tried to build agentic workflows on top of their existing digital infrastructure. The transition has been especially challenging for those in regulated industries, financial services and government. Customers have requested to have expert AI engineers work directly with their teams, according to Amazon.

Amazon aims to address these issues head on with its FDE initiative.

"It is agentic-first, it compresses timelines from months to days and it is designed so customers are self-sufficient when a deployment ends," Amazon said. "AWS FDE embeds AWS frontier teams - working with purpose-built agents - directly inside customer teams. These experienced engineers, many of whom build our AWS AI services, partner with a customer's business, engineering and security teams to build and deploy production AI systems with their data, governance and processes."

According to Amazon, AWS FDEs will bring a "semantic layer" to customers' AWS accounts, which connects to various enterprise data sources to create a "governed, versioned knowledge graph" for AI agents to reason over.

A differentiation between FDEs and traditional consultants is that FDEs measure success through shared long-term business goals instead of billable hours, Amazon noted.

The scale of investment in AI has raised the stakes for both Amazon and its customers, making the success of FDEs critically important. Amazon plans to spend $200 billion on capital expenditures this year, and will need to prove to investors in the coming quarters that it can generate a return on investment. The company believes FDEs are one way that it can help bolster the speed and scale of AI adoption.

In recent months, companies like Microsoft (MSFT), OpenAI and Anthropic have rolled out similar initiatives by partnering with consulting firms and deploying FDEs of their own.

-Christine Ji

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06-30-26 1342ET