[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Microsoft said on July 2 it will launch a dedicated organisation, Microsoft Frontier Co, to support corporate AI adoption and invest $2.5 billion.

Microsoft Frontier Co will be run with 6,000 employees deployed directly to customer sites.

It will include existing Microsoft field engineers, technical consultants, support personnel and industry-specific sales staff. Rodrigo Kede Lima, who has led the business in Asia, will head the unit.

With Microsoft joining, the picture is that the Big 3 companies that dominate the global cloud market and the AI model market leaders, OpenAI and Anthropic, are using FDE to jump into the AI business.

Two days earlier, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud company, announced it will invest $1 billion to establish a Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organisation. Anthropic and OpenAI also set up field-deployed engineering organisations in May. A May report by The Information said Google is also hiring several hundred forward deployed engineers (FDE) to support adoption of enterprise AI products.

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, also disclosed on LinkedIn that it will create an FDE team within Google Cloud. At the time, Matt Renner, then chief revenue officer (CRO) of Google Cloud, said, "We will not just send more salespeople, but approach customers with more technical resources."

Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, said of setting up the field-deployed engineering organisation, "It stemmed from the recognition that customers are now in different situations and are trying to figure out how to use AI." He added, "They have to decide whether to use one OpenAI model, one Anthropic model, or mix multiple models. They also have to consider how to look at existing business processes and operating methods."

Microsoft recorded revenue of $2.1 billion in enterprise and partner services for the quarter ended in March, up 2.5 percent from a year earlier.