Microsoft and Amazon Commit Billions to New AI Implementation Units for Businesses (cnbc.com)
- Reference: 0184322022
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/07/05/2022256/microsoft-and-amazon-commit-billions-to-new-ai-implementation-units-for-businesses
- Source link: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/02/microsoft-commits-2point5-billion-6000-employees-ai-implementation-unit.html
> [Microsoft] said Thursday that 6,000 employees will be embedded with clients, in a practice that's become known as forward deployed engineering [or FDE]... The announcement comes two days after cloud rival Amazon said it was [2]putting $1 billion behind an FDE initiative to support fast-paced AI engagements. Leading AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI both established FDE groups in May, partnering with private equity firms, banks and consulting firms.
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> Alongside its technology peers, Microsoft has sunk tens of billions of dollars into building data centers that run generative AI models. Microsoft has also released a variety of AI services, with mixed results. The Microsoft 365 Copilot AI assistant [3]has yet to gain anything approaching ubiquity in the business world, and the GitHub Copilot coding agent has [4]ceded market share to newer players. Microsoft's stock has slumped 21% this year, by far the worst performance among the mega-cap tech companies. One concern on Wall Street is that AI models that quickly compose code might threaten mature software companies...
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> Microsoft has for years provided support and implementation services to customers. The company generated about $2.1 billion in revenue from enterprise and partner services in the [5]March quarter , up 2.5% from a year earlier.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/02/microsoft-commits-2point5-billion-6000-employees-ai-implementation-unit.html
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/30/aws-amazon-ai-forward-deployed-engineers.html
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/microsoft-faces-uphill-climb-to-win-in-ai-chatbots-with-copilot.html
[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-was-positioned-to-win-in-ai-coding-outages-got-in-the-way.html
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/29/microsoft-msft-q3-earnings-report-2026.html
I thought AI sold itself? (Score:2)
You promised AI would be getting rid of these worthless, filthy, loathsome "employees", and now you're sending more of them!
Re: (Score:2)
> You promised AI would be getting rid of these worthless, filthy, loathsome "employees", and now you're sending more of them!
Yup.
"You're not burning through tokens fast enough to make any of this profitable for us so we're sending someone to show you how to waste resources faster."
Remember folks... every time you ask ChatGPT what Ford's web site is or ask Claude to paste in a buggle version of someone's broken code for you to debug, or ask Grok for pictures of some naked totally-adults, you're driving the price of RAM and storage up.
Re: (Score:1)
No doubt, he will comment.
Lots of Kilo Watts for "AI" (Score:1)
But none for our AC
Sorry, we'll have to ration the water as well.
Microsoft wants eyes into your business. (Score:2)
They're embedding thousands of engineers inside client organizations not just to "help" with AI implementations, but to hoover up proprietary data, workflows, and problems then repackage those insights as shiny new "MICROS~1 innovations."
It's the same game Google played with search: results ranked by how many links pointed to a site. Now with AI, the answers you get are mostly remixed from other people's conversations and data, creating a convincing illusion of intelligence on the other end.
Forward-de
"6,000 employees will be embedded" (Score:4, Insightful)
might be just me but this looks more like infestation than implementation assistance. Something tells me these employees will choose the tools in their approved tool box and not the best tools for the customers job.