Amazon Web Services Inc. said today it’s rolling out a new dedicated organization to bring agentic artificial intelligence systems, built on the same technology, to customers by embedding engineers in enterprise customer operations.

Backed by a $1 billion investment, the dedicated Forward Deployed Engineering department will bring what the cloud computing giant calls AWS frontier teams into the field. These are small groups of experienced experts who work directly within enterprise companies, along with AI agents, to customize, wire up and educate customers.

Agentic AI is at the forefront of the company’s new approach, Francessca Vasquez, vice president of Frontier AI Engineering and Services, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. Agents are changing the business landscape in ways never seen before, and customers are caught in the turbulence, trying to keep up with the transformation.

“It’s like the next inflection point,” Vasquez said. “It’s not just workloads and use cases. It is really taking a true business workflow end-to-end.”

Machine learning has quietly underpinned many business operations for years, but the advent of generative AI has rapidly changed the game. Its emergence and evolution have created a demand for enterprise experimentation ever since OpenAI Group PBC introduced ChatGPT to the mainstream. Since then, it has shifted from question-and-answer chatbots to fully autonomous agents capable of fulfilling complete business-oriented goals with humans in the loop.

The wake of this transformation has only accelerated already existing desires to tighten software and product development workflows, allowing companies to take ideas to production faster than ever before.

Vasquez said that customers came to AWS with a pain point of trying to condense two- and three-year transformation projects into something more manageable for the current fast-paced business environment. According to the company, its FDE teams can compress what took months into days using agentic AI, and when they complete a task with a verifiable outcome, they leave behind the same intelligent tools they used to build it.

“The new currency of value is speed,” Vasquez said. “Ideate on in 45 minutes, validate that idea in 45 hours, and then ship something within your workflow of value in 45 days.”

This 45/45/45 work metric permeates the FDE approach. Although the objective is to complete a single package within the 45-day window, Vasquez noted that it’s fine if it arrives sooner. Sometimes teams remain on site for multiple sprints, either to iterate on a design or to move on to wire up multiple departments or use cases that cannot be completed readily in parallel.

Digital gold into operational infrastructure

The era of generative AI showed the tech industry that data, especially the bespoke business data and constant information generated by the people working there, is akin to “digital gold.” It’s the beating heart of enterprise operations, holding everything together, and it’s also required to make AI agents smarter and more accurate.

After an FDE team lands and completes a sprint, they leave behind more than just an app, Vasquez said. The objective is to build the company’s semantic layer. The idea of a semantic layer, knowledge graph, or internal ontology has become the motto of agentic transformation; it is the core of what could be called a “system of intelligence” for agents, by building a network of relationships among software, business knowledge, processes and structure.

“It’s a customer’s ontology of their information, which for many organizations is gold,” Vasquez explained. FDE teams provide support alongside the completion of integration and transformation. “Being able to codify elements of that is also super useful for organizations.”

Customers already using FDE teams on site include a broad variety of technology-oriented industry players. They include the Allen Institute for AI, Cox Automotive Inc., the National Basketball Association, the National Football League and Ricoh Company Ltd.

“The NFL has millions of fans who want to consume football content throughout the year, including the offseason,” said Gary Brantley, chief information officer of the NFL. “We innovate at the pace and scale needed to meet the high expectations of our fans.”

Brantley explained that, by using the new FDE paradigm and partnering with AWS, the NFL has been able to spin up new digital experiences, including fan-facing products such as NFL Fantasy AI and NFL IQ. These products allow fans to interact with NFL data in ways that were not immediately plausible before the generative AI and agentic revolution.

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