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Microsoft has committed USD 2.5 billion to a new operating business called Microsoft Frontier Company that will help its customers utilise artificial intelligence efficiently.
The Microsoft Frontier Company will embed 6,000 industry and engineering experts with its customers, helping them utilise AI in a way that boosts productivity with measurable business outcomes and demonstrates that the hefty AI investments that have been made are yielding results. Microsoft claims that this initiative goes beyond what has come to be known as Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE), a practice that puts engineers at clients' facilities to help adopt, customise and implement technology efficiently. As companies move past the experimentation stage, they are looking for ways in which they can amplify their intelligence and at the same time, protect intellectual property. "It will provide a unique combination of skills inclusive of deep industry knowledge, change management and continuous improvement experience, and enterprise-grade AI engineering expertise," Judson Althoff, CEO, Microsoft Commercial Business, wrote in a blog post. The move comes just two days after rival Amazon AWS announced that it is investing USD 1 billion in a new FDE unit for customers to harness the power of AI. The AI race is heating up as massive investments flow in the emerging technology. Top hyperscalers like Amazon AWS, Alphabet, and Microsoft are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to ramp up data centre capacity as the need for compute infrastructure rises exponentially. Enterprises are deploying agentic AI as the technology gallops from the generative to the agentic phase. Althoff explained the approach in the blog post, saying that a customer's data and IP are something that should not be used to train models that will make them lose the industry advantage that they have. This is something that the Palantir CEO has also backed. "Central to this approach is a principle that is non-negotiable: a customer's IQ is protected. Their data, their IP, their competitive advantage -- none of it is used to train models in ways that commoditize what differentiates them in their industry," the blog post read. (ANI)
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