- Microsoft Frontier Company will add 6,000 engineers and specialists to its 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 the Amazon alternative.
Microsoft has launched a new branch to expand its own AI consultants into client businesses, backed by a massive $2.5 billion investment.
The new Microsoft Frontier Company will embed more than 6,000 specialists, AI engineers and technical experts directly within customer organizations to help build, implement and optimize their own AI strategies.
Microsoft described it as “the largest, most capable, results-oriented engineering organization in the industry”; The plan comes days after Amazon announced a similar plan backed by $1 billion.
Microsoft launches advanced engineering (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 simply competing to deliver ROI in AI.
Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business, emphasized the importance of intelligence and trust when designing the right AI strategy for your customers. The role of intelligence involves understanding the broader 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-focused solution, the company emphasized that proprietary data, workflows, and more remain private to enterprises and are not used to training models.
Another major selling point for the industry’s “largest” AI FDE scheme 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 limit themselves 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 technological changes into business outcomes and understanding how platform innovation, engineering, and partner ecosystem collaboration come together to drive growth,” Althoff wrote.
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