Microsoft spends $2.5 billion to deploy AI engineers to customers

Microsoft Frontier Company to integrate 6,000 engineers and specialists into customer organizations
Backed by $2.5 billion in funding from Microsoft, it will help customers transform with personalized AI.
This is the “largest” of its kind, 2.5 times the value of Amazon’s alternative

Microsoft has launched a brand new subdivision to extend its own AI consultants to its clients’ businesses, backed by a massive $2.5 billion investment.

The new Microsoft Frontier Company will integrate more than 6,000 AI specialists, engineers and technical experts directly into customer organizations to help them build, deploy and optimize their own AI strategies.

Microsoft described it as “the industry’s largest, most knowledgeable, and most results-driven engineering organization” – the program comes days after Amazon announced a similar $1 billion-backed program.

Microsoft Launches Advance Deployed Engineer (FDE) Program for AI

Although similar in concept to other FDE programs, Microsoft believes its Frontier company will be different in that it will add additional layers of industry expertise, change management, continuous improvement and more, rather than just rushing to deliver a return on AI investment.

Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business, highlighted the importance of intelligence and trust in building an AI strategy that works for its customers. The role of intelligence involves understanding the overall organizational context, workflows and processes, while trust is about governance, observability and accountability.

Frontier Company’s early customers include LSEG and Unilever, and of course, being an enterprise-centric solution, the company emphasized that proprietary data, workflows and more remain private to businesses and are not used to train models.

Another major selling point of the “largest” AI FDE program in the industry is that customers can choose between models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and other open source alternatives to provide the best solution for each workload, rather than forcing companies to lock in to a single tool.

Microsoft Frontier Company will be led by former Microsoft Asia President Rodrigo Kede Lima. “He has been at the forefront of helping customers and partners translate technology changes into business outcomes and understand how platform innovation, engineering and partner ecosystem collaboration come together to drive growth,” Althoff wrote.

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