Francessca Vasquez Vice President AWS
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WS unveiled its own Forward Deployed Engineering( FDE) organisation, backed by a US $ 1bn investment funded entirely from its own balance sheet. Unlike Microsoft’ s approach, AWS has embraced the FDE label directly, placing engineers within customer teams to build, deploy and scale AI solutions using agents purpose-built for specific business needs.
Francessca Vasquez, Vice President of Frontier AI Engineering and Services at AWS, explained the rationale behind the launch:“ Customers have moved past exploring what AI can do; they want to make it core to how they operate. They want to recreate their business processes with agentic AI built in so they can increase productivity and deliver AI-powered products.”
The model is built around three principles: it is agentic-first; it compresses deployment timelines from months to days; and it aims to leave customers able to run their systems independently once an engagement ends. Teams work in pods of five to six engineers on 45-day sprints, using what AWS describes as an AI-Driven Development Lifecycle that pairs AI agents with human oversight.
Crucially, AWS has positioned the unit as internal infrastructure rather than a spin-out.
“ This organisation is a separate business unit within AWS, not a standalone company,” Francessca told Channel Dive, distinguishing the initiative from the joint-venture structures some rivals have used to fund their own deployment arms.
104 September 2026