The wildly successful rebrand of "professional services" to the more militaristic and edgy "forward-deployed engineers" continues to sweep through enterprise tech, and Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon Thursday with the launch of a new organization designed to help customers get AI up and running.
"We are making a $2.5B investment in Microsoft Frontier Company, embedding 6,000 industry and engineering experts at customers to co-design, co-innovate, deploy and continuously improve AI systems at scale based on measurable business outcomes," said Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft's commercial business, in a blog post Thursday. Rodrigo Kede Lima, who is currently president of Microsoft Asia and has led several different regional organizations across the company for years, will be president of the new group.
The whole FDE thing is a modern twist on an old enterprise tech truism: While there are always some companies eager to adopt a new technology and shape it around their business needs, most companies do not have the in-house tech expertise to make that happen. These are generally companies in non-tech industries, like banking or manufacturing, that appreciate how new tools like AI agents could improve their tech infrastructure but need help going from concept to production.
