New AI push seeks to cut deployment time from months to days

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A new $1 billion effort seeking to place thousands of artificial intelligence (AI) specialists inside businesses aims to help companies move AI from testing into everyday operations.

The specialists will work alongside business teams to build and deploy AI systems that can perform tasks and make decisions with limited human intervention, cutting the time needed to put such systems into operation from months to days while giving companies the skills to manage the technology themselves.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon, created the new Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organisation to run the effort.

The team will work with customers’ business, engineering and security teams to build AI systems around their data, governance requirements and existing processes.

AWS said the approach will focus on business results rather than traditional consultancy based on billable hours. Customers are expected to leave with functioning AI systems as well as new engineering skills and workflows.

The team will use an approach called the AI-Driven Development Lifecycle, where AI agents assist across software development while human engineers oversee and verify their work.

AWS is already working with organisations including the Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football League (NFL), Ricoh and Southwest Airlines.

“AWS engineers worked alongside our team to launch into production in just weeks,” said Gary Brantley, chief information officer of the NFL.

Brantley noted that the partnership produced new products including NFL Fantasy AI and NFL IQ, which allow fans to interact with NFL data.

AWS will deploy a semantic layer inside customers’ AWS accounts to connect enterprise data sources, enrich metadata and create a governed and versioned knowledge graph for AI agents.

The system is designed to keep specialist knowledge within an organisation’s software and data rather than relying on individual employees or external consultants.

AWS said security measures, including hardware-based isolation and end-to-end encryption, will be built into the deployments, while customer data will remain within each organisation’s governance framework.

The investment builds on AWS’s work with businesses since 2017. Its Generative AI Innovation Centre has worked on thousands of customer projects over the past three years, including helping BMW reduce service disruptions across 23 million connected vehicles, developing a manufacturing assistant for Jabil’s factory workers and helping Lyft resolve driver-support issues 87 per cent faster, according to AWS.

The new organisation will target companies that have moved beyond AI experiments and need the technology operating within real-world business processes, with regulated industries, financial services firms and government agencies expected to be among its customers.