AWS AI Director On Forward Deployed Engineers And Partners’ ‘Clear’ Path Ahead Together

Amazon Web Services’ new $1 billion-backed Forward Deployed Engineering team will help channel partners drive AI deals and revenue via a co-sales motion unlike any other in the market, says AWS’ Taimur Rashid.

For partners who want to co-deliver with AWS’ Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization, “the opportunity is clear,” Rashid, managing director for AWS’ Frontier AI Engineering and Services, tells CRN.

“The reason partners should team with us is clear—we bring frontier software engineering experience, applied science expertise, and three years of hands-on experience enabling customers to use AI to drive business outcomes,” said Rashid. “The partners bring complementary capabilities that customers need like existing relationships, industry depth and operational reach.”

The $169 billion cloud market share leader will leverage AWS partners’ expertise around AI models, industry knowledge and skills to make sure the correct engineers are available to customers.

Seattle-based AWS is also investing in partner training, tools, and resources to accelerate AWS FDE engagements.

Rashid said the combination of partner capabilities together with AWS FDE engineering and science will enable joint customers “to move faster and sustain results at scale.”

AWS’ FDE $1 Billion Strategy

Amazon invested $1 billion into launching the AWS Forward Deployed Engineering organization last month.

“We’re taking the software engineers who built our production AWS services and combining that frontier engineering expertise with our science capabilities to help customers drive real business outcomes from AI,” said Rashid. “We’ve already been doing this for the past three years through our GenAI Innovation Center.”

AWS and partners will work directly with enterprises to move AI from concept to production as quickly as possible.

“Partners fit into this the same way they’ve fit into other AWS competency areas. First, it’s important for partners to understand our FDE methodology and approach,” Rashid said. “Second, just like our other joint delivery models, AWS and partners can co-deliver for joint customers.”

BizCloud Experts, a premier tier AWS partner, expects to win more AI deals and drive net new sales by working with AWS FDE.

“AWS is bringing the folks that can understand both the business and technology logic of AI to help solve everything in a shorter cycle for the customer and get them answers faster,” said Sepehr Noorizadeh, president and chief growth officer for BizCloud Experts.

“What AWS is doing for the forward deployed engineers is setting up the partner ecosystem for success,” Noorizadeh said. “Because someone’s going to have to go deploy it at scale for the customer anyways. And that’s where AWS is looking at the partner ecosystem and saying, ‘How can we now go together and co-sell?’”

“So every time AWS goes into a conversation, they’re going into conversations with partners as well. That’s why, for me, it’s not a competitor to us. If anything, it’s complementary to what we’re doing in a force multiplier way,” he said.

In the second quarter of 2026, AWS reported $42.2 billion in total revenue, increasing Amazon’s cloud unit to a record $169 billion annual run rate.

The $42.2 billion in revenue represented a year-over-year growth rate of 37 percent, marking AWS’ highest growth rate in 18 quarters.

AWS remains the world’s cloud market share leader, according to Q2 2026 data from Synergy Research Group.

AWS currently owns 28 percent share of the global cloud infrastructure services market, followed by Microsoft at 20 percent share, then Google Cloud at 15 percent share.

AWS AI Director On Forward Deployed Engineers And Partners’ ‘Clear’ Path Ahead Together

AWS’ FDE $1 Billion Strategy

AWS Q2 2026 Results And Cloud Market Share