Amazon said on Tuesday it is creating a new division under its Amazon Web Services cloud unit employing so-called forward-deployed ‌engineers who embed with customers to help them more quickly and efficiently adopt artificial ‌intelligence software. The company is committing an initial $1 billion to the initiative with the goal of sending five to six pods of engineers to customers for 45-day periods, said Francessca Vasquez, AWS vice president of frontier AI engineering and services. Forward-deployed engineers are versatile workers ⁠who embed directly alongside clients, navigate internal politics and write production-grade code to help make models deliver results.