Transforming Organisations with AI is not an infrastructure problem. It’s a ways of working problem.

Last week Microsoft announced "The Microsoft Frontier Company", committing around $2.5 billion to embed Microsoft engineers inside customer organisations to build and operate AI systems. Amazon has announced a similar $1 billion initiative, following comparable investments from OpenAI and Anthropic.

In many ways, none of this is new.

Palantir Technologies pioneered the concept of forward-deployed engineers almost twenty years ago, embedding technical teams inside customers to design, build and operate solutions alongside the business rather than simply selling software and walking away.

The strategy makes perfect sense BUT the really interesting question is why every major AI provider is now following the same playbook?

I believe they have discovered the same uncomfortable truth - for most organisations, building AI is only about 10% of the challenge.

The remaining 90% has very little to do with models or infrastructure.

At Veles Consulting, we describe successful AI transformation as:

👉 10% AI

👉 20% Data & Technology

👉 70% Reinventing How People Work

Forward-deployed engineers can build outstanding AI systems BUT they cannot

💣 redesign your operating model.

💣 simplify your decision-making.

💣remove organisational silos.

💣rewrite incentives.

💣persuade leaders to trust new ways of working. And

🎯 they certainly cannot transform a legacy organisation into an AI-native enterprise. That work belongs to leadership.

The more interesting signal from these announcements is not that Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic and OpenAI are investing billions in customer engineering.

It is that they increasingly recognise technology alone is not enough to unlock customer value.

After all, their future growth depends not on selling more AI, but on customers generating measurable business outcomes from it. If organisations continue to treat AI as another IT programme, many will deploy impressive technology while changing very little.

The winners won’t be those with the largest models or the most GPUs. They will be the organisations willing to reinvent how work gets done.

AI isn’t the transformation. It is the catalyst for #organisationaltransformation.

What do you think? Is #AI success becoming more about organisational design than technology?