Microsoft has announced Microsoft Frontier Company, a new business unit to help enterprises deploy AI systems at scale. The initiative is backed by a $2.5 billion investment and a team of 6,000 industry and engineering experts who will be embedded with customers.
Microsoft also named Rodrigo Kede Lima as President of Microsoft Frontier Company. Lima previously led Microsoft’s enterprise business across the Americas and Asia and will oversee the new organisation.
The company said the new organisation will combine AI engineering, industry expertise, change management and continuous improvement to help customers design, deploy and refine AI systems tied to measurable business outcomes.
“Today we are introducing Microsoft Frontier Company, a new operating business focused on delivering Frontier Transformation through AI for our customers around the world,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Microsoft said enterprises are moving beyond AI experimentation and are now seeking measurable returns while ensuring their proprietary knowledge remains protected.
The company said organisations need an intelligence platform where their proprietary data, expertise, workflows and decision-making processes can improve over time while allowing customers to choose the AI models that best fit their needs. It also said enterprises require trusted platforms that provide governance, security and cost management across AI deployments.
Microsoft said the new business will focus on connecting these capabilities through AI engineering to create a continuous improvement cycle for agentic business processes.
The company cited projects with the London Stock Exchange Group, Land O’Lakes, Unilever and Novo Nordisk as early examples of customer deployments delivering business outcomes.
Microsoft also said it will work with systems integrators, including Accenture, Capgemini, EY, KPMG and PwC to expand the offering globally.
A key part of the initiative is Microsoft’s commitment that customer data and intellectual property will not be used to train AI models.
“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 commoditise what differentiates them in their industry,” Microsoft said.
The company added that it will continue supporting a model-agnostic approach rather than locking customers into a single AI provider.
“Customers shouldn’t be locked into a single model any more than they should be locked into a single technology vendor,” it said. “Microsoft’s platform gives organisations the flexibility to run the right model for each scenario — whether it comes from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft AI, open source or a specialised model tuned for a specific industry — without ceding control to any one of them.”
Amazon Web Services (AWS) also recently announced a $1 billion investment to launch a new Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organisation that will place AI engineers inside customer teams to co-develop and deploy agentic AI systems.
The new unit targets enterprises that have moved beyond AI pilots and want to integrate AI into business operations. AWS said the teams will work directly with customers’ engineering, business, and security teams to build production AI systems using their own data and governance frameworks.
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