Microsoft. [Reuters]
Microsoft. [Reuters]

Microsoft is pushing to accelerate AI adoption among its corporate customers.

The company announced Thursday (local time) the launch of "MS Frontier Company," a new forward-deployed engineering (FDE) organization that embeds engineers directly at client sites to help them implement and use AI.

Microsoft has committed $2.5 billion (3.8 trillion won) to the unit and assembled a team of 6,000 specialists, including engineers. The company said it has already seen results from deploying engineers to select clients to optimize AI integration.

Among the early deployments, Microsoft built a system for market research firm London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) that allows financial professionals to quickly query AI across a broad range of financial content. Similar solutions have been applied at Unilever and Novo Nordisk.

"Companies need to build an intelligence platform where their unique IQ — their proprietary data, expertise, workflows and decision-making processes — can naturally accumulate," said Judson Althoff, Microsoft's chief commercial officer. "MS Frontier Company was created precisely for that purpose."

Rival Amazon Web Services (AWS) made a similar move, announcing late last month the creation of "AWS FDE," a comparable organization backed by $1 billion (approximately 1.5 trillion won). AWS said the unit would cut the time needed for enterprise AI deployment from months to days, adopt an agent-centric approach, and enable customers to operate AI systems independently after deployment is complete.

The aggressive spending by major cloud providers on engineering advisory and support services reflects a growing gap between the spread of AI adoption and the tangible value companies actually experience from it.

A McKinsey report released in April found that nine in 10 companies had adopted AI as of late last year, yet 94 percent of them had failed to derive meaningful value from their AI investments. Cloud providers appear to be responding by dispatching their own personnel to demonstrate AI's profitability firsthand — and to lock customers more firmly into their respective ecosystems.

The trend extends beyond cloud providers. OpenAI and Anthropic, which sell AI models directly to enterprises, offer similar hands-on solutions. US AI data analytics firm Palantir has also built a successful business model around deploying engineers to government agencies and corporations in much the same way.


yckim6452@heraldcorp.com