Microsoft will invest $2.5 billion in a new division aimed at helping customers implement artificial intelligence (AI).
Microsoft Frontier Company, announced Thursday (July 2), will also deploy 6,000 industry and engineering experts to the tech giant’s customers in what the company calls a step up in what is known as “forward deployment engineering” (FDE).
“The pace of AI adoption is moving incredibly fast. Customers have gone far beyond experimentation and understand the importance of deploying AI to transform their businesses,” said Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, in explaining the initiative. “They are now focused on achieving measurable business outcomes and demonstrating the benefits of their AI investments, while ensuring enhanced intelligence and protection of intellectual property.”
The news comes on the heels of Amazon’s cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) announcing earlier this week that it would invest $1 billion in its FDE initiative, which will bring thousands of engineers on-site to customers to develop AI solutions. This program aims to speed up the development of AI applications in days instead of months.
“At its core is an AI-driven development lifecycle, a new approach to software development that combines AI execution with human oversight and dynamic team collaboration to build intelligence for customers’ next projects,” the company said.
AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic have also launched their own FDE groups to work with private equity groups and banks to accelerate enterprise adoption.
In an interview with CNBC, Althoff said FDE’s efforts are a result of the company’s recognition that “customers are in a completely different place right now and are really trying to understand AI.”
“Do you snap to one model from OpenAI, one model from Anthropic, or a family of models?” Althoff said in an interview. “Are they thinking about it in a technology-first mindset? How do they view their existing business processes and operations?”
Meanwhile, a recent PYMNTS Intelligence study found that U.S. workers receive little to no training on how to use AI on the job.
As PYMNTS wrote in May, a study called “Wage to Wallet™ Index – The Resilience Deficit: Labor Workers in an Automated Economy” found that 48% of U.S. workers in educated, professional, high-paying roles, typically salaried, “come to work every day faced with AI tools they are not prepared to use effectively.”
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