亚马逊AI专家上门服务：前置部署工程

Amazon.com now offers the temporary embedding of its own employees with large customers of Amazon Web Services (AWS). They are to assemble and install AI agents at the customers' premises, which then use AWS services. Amazon calls these house visitors Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE), a marketing term adopted from Palantir.

The goal, of course, is to accelerate sales, but also to bind customers to AWS. Once the AI agents are deeply integrated into a large organization's IT, switching to a competitor becomes complex and therefore expensive. The AWS-FDEs are to be embedded especially in sensitive areas such as government agencies, financial institutions, and strictly regulated industries like finance.

The process regularly begins with the setup of so-called knowledge graphs; the information available at the respective customer is compiled in such a way that the AWS agents can easily process it. Finally, it is intended to make human employees more easily replaceable: “Agents reason over that knowledge graph, so domain expertise lives in the customer’s code, not in institutional knowledge that could rotate off,” formulates AWS Vice President Francessca Vasquez.

Amazon: “No traditional consulting"

Amazon is setting up its own FDE department at AWS, investing a billion US dollars according to its own statements. The FDEs are to operate worldwide, including in German-speaking regions, as the company confirmed to heise online. Amazon has not yet provided concrete details on the fee structure. However, it is said to focus on “business outcomes and deliverables,” not on billed man-hours or traditional consulting fees.

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 focuses on customer independence rather than dependence. As the respective project progresses, the customer's IT staff will gradually transition from observers to participants and finally to independent operators of the AI agents. Simultaneously

According to the information, initial customers of the FDE offering include Ricoh, an American airline, two American sports leagues, Cox Automotive, and the Allen Institute. The latter is a neuroscience research institution founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and his wife Jody.