AWS is investing $1B to create a Forward Deployed Engineering organization that embeds thousands of its engineers directly inside customer teams to co-build and deploy agentic AI systems in days rather than months. The engineers, many of whom build AWS AI services, work alongside a customer’s business, engineering, and security teams using purpose-built agents, and structure engagements around business outcomes rather than billable hours. AWS says the model leaves customers self-sufficient, deploying a semantic layer into the customer’s own AWS account that publishes a governed knowledge graph agents can reason over, so expertise stays in code rather than walking out the door. Early customers include the Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, the NBA, the NFL, Ricoh, and Southwest Airlines.
