Amazon quietly copies Palantir’s AI deployment strategy
Amazon is putting about 1 billion dollars into a new team inside AWS called forward deployed engineers. These are highly technical engineers who do not just sell software. They go directly into customer companies like airlines, sports leagues, or banks and build AI systems with them on site.
So instead of saying “here is our AI platform, figure it out,” Amazon is saying: We will send experts into your business and build the AI systems for you, inside your environment, using your data.
That is the “Palantir playbook.”
Palantir popularized this model by embedding engineers inside customers for weeks or months to: Connect messy enterprise data Build custom AI workflows Make sure the system actually gets adopted and used
The key insight is that enterprise AI is hard to implement. Most companies do not fail because they lack software. They fail because they cannot integrate it into real operations.
FAWS is trying to speed up AI adoption. If customers struggle to build AI agents, Amazon now helps build them directly, which makes AWS stickier.
Second, it turns AWS partly into a consulting plus engineering hybrid, not just cloud hosting. That can increase revenue per customer because implementation becomes part of the product.
Third, it is competitive positioning. Companies like Palantir built a strong moat not just from software, but from deep embedded execution. Now Amazon, and other AI leaders, are copying that because it works.