Amazon.com is now offering temporary embedding of its own employees with large Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers. They are supposed to put together and install AI agents for customers, which then use AWS services. Amazon calls these home visitors Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE), a marketing term adopted from Palantir.
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The aim is of course to accelerate sales, but also to bind customers to AWS. Once the AI agents are deeply integrated into the IT of a large organization, switching to a competitor becomes complex and therefore expensive. The AWS FDEs should be embedded especially in sensitive areas such as authorities, financial institutions and strictly regulated industries such as finance.
At the beginning there is usually the construction of so-called knowledge graphs; The information available to each customer is compiled in such a way that the AWS agents can easily process it. Last but not least, this should make human employees easier to replace: “Expertise lives in the customer’s code, not in organizational knowledge that can be eliminated,” says AWS Vice President Francessca Vasquez.
Amazon: “Not traditional consulting”
Amazon is setting up its own FDE department at AWS and says it is investing $1 billion for it. The FDEs are to operate worldwide, including in German-speaking countries, as the company confirmed to heise online. Amazon has not yet provided any specific information about the fee structure. However, it should focus on “business outcomes and deliverables”, not on billed man-hours or traditional consulting remuneration.
AWS FDE is aimed at large customers who are beyond AI experiments and want to use AI for real business processes. The data company promises that the FDE system is not based on dependence, but rather on the independence of customers. As the respective project progresses, the customer’s IT employees would gradually move from observers to participants and finally to independent operators of the AI agents. At the same time
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Initial customers of the FDE offer are said to be Ricoh, an American airline, two American sports leagues, Cox Automotive and the Allen Institute. The latter is a neuroscience research facility founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and his wife Jody.
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