San Francisco – Microsoft is setting up a new organisation with 6,000 employees to help businesses with the technical and strategic work of deploying artificial intelligence.The division’s workers will have experience across engineering, corporate training and management, as well as within specific industries, Microsoft announced on July 2. “The skills sets required to do this are quite unique. We’ve got folks that have been in banking for 20 years – in retail, energy, life sciences,” Judson Althoff, chief executive of Microsoft’s commercial business, said on July 2 in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Working more closely with customers will help them implement AI more efficiently and inform Microsoft’s own product development decisions, Althoff said.Traditionally, software vendors have left this kind of lower-margin implementation work to consulting companies. But in the AI era, many have found that businesses need additional help deploying cutting-edge-tools.Popularised by Palantir Technologies, the model of deploying engineers within customer organisations has been adopted by vendors from Salesforce to OpenAI. Amazon.com’s cloud unit on July 1 announced a similar effort. The idea for the new organisation came in part from customer concerns about the ballooning costs of AI, Althoff said.Microsoft can help those businesses improve the way they use AI, such as by swopping out expensive models for cheaper ones, he said. BLOOMBERG