Amazon Web Services (AWS) is establishing a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) unit to help client companies adopt artificial intelligence (AI).
AWS announced the creation of the FDE unit Tuesday, saying it would invest $1 billion (about 1.54 trillion won) in the organization. An FDE is an engineer who works on-site at client companies to identify operational problems and provide solutions to resolve them. Palantir first introduced the model more than 20 years ago, and FDEs have gained attention recently as AI transformation (AX) has become a key topic.
AWS's FDE model shortens the deployment period for AI solutions from months to days, and is designed so that customers can operate systems independently even after deployment ends. AWS plans to embed the AWS Frontier team, made up of engineers who have developed AWS AI services, directly within customer teams. In addition, unlike conventional consulting that treats each solution deployment as an individual project, AWS FDE builds solutions from a long-term perspective. The plan is to help customers operate solutions independently once a project concludes.
In particular, AWS FDE intends to use agent deployment technology and an "AI-driven development lifecycle." This is a new software development approach in which AI leads execution, humans supervise it, and teams collaborate.
The AWS FDE team is currently working with the Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, the National Basketball Association (NBA), Ricoh, Southwest Airlines and the National Football League (NFL), among others. Gary Brantley, NFL Chief Information Officer (CIO), said, "We worked with AWS FDE to create digital experiences for fans," adding, "As a result, we were able to launch various fan-facing services such as NFL Fantasy AI and NFL IQ in just a few weeks."
