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SAN FRANCISCO: AWS and Microsoft want to embed thousands of their own engineers at client companies to help them capitalise on artificial intelligence, which has yet to prove its profitability in the business world.
Microsoft announced on Thursday the creation of a unit called Microsoft Frontier Company, which is backed by a $2.5 billion investment and brings together 6,000 experts and engineers.
The new Microsoft entity comes as rival AWS, the world’s leading cloud provider, announced on Tuesday a similar $1 billion investment in an organisation called Forward Deployed Engineering, also tasked with dispatching thousands of engineers to help clients.
The two cloud giants are responding to the same challenge: companies are buying more AI tools, but those investments are not yet paying off in obvious ways. As of the end of 2025, almost nine out of 10 companies had deployed AI in at least one business function, but 94 percent reported no significant benefit from those expenditures, according to consultancy McKinsey.
