Microsoft and EY will spend $1 billion on helping their customers adopt AI over the next five years.

The billion will support assisting clients with pioneering AI projects and capability building, said EY’s global Microsoft alliance leader, Paul Clark. Clients will be able to access those resources based on their specific needs, he said.

“We’re intentionally building the EY forward deployed engineer (FDE) capability through close collaboration and training with Microsoft, while maintaining integrated EY-Microsoft teams in the field,” he said in an email. “Clients will continue to experience this as one combined team, bringing together engineering depth and transformation expertise.”

EY has acted as “client zero” in this initiative, embedding AI in all facets of its organization while it validated ways of working with Microsoft’s technologies. After an initial trial of Microsoft Copilot with 150,000 users, it is now rolling it out through Microsoft 365 E7 to all 400,000 staff.

Its combined offering with Microsoft will be fully integrated, with shared governance and accountability across both organizations, it said. Initial services will cover finance, tax, risk, HR and supply chain activities within the financial services, industrials and energy, consumer and retail, government, and health care sectors.

Pain and suffering

The company’s status as client zero is important here, said Greyhound Research Chief Analyst Sanchit Vir Gogia. “It gives EY a proving ground, not just a reference story. The firm can test AI across its own global workforce, professional services processes and regulated client delivery environment before taking the patterns outward. That gives it a sharper commercial proposition: not ‘we understand AI’, but ‘we have suffered through the operating friction before you’. In enterprise technology, lived pain is often more valuable than polished optimism.”

EY is not merely reselling Microsoft’s AI story, he added. “It is positioning itself as the interpreter between Microsoft’s engineering depth and the client’s messy operational reality.”

Technology analyst Carmi Levy said the challenges of scaling AI solutions are monumental, so it makes sense for vendors to bolster their own support capabilities to allow customers to capture maximum value from their AI investment.

“The forward deployed engineer seems like an ideal solution to this vexing problem, a ready-made, vendor-provided, fully trained resource whose sole job is to help customers crack the AI code and turn its potential into realizable gains,” he said. “FDEs can help tune a given agentic system to the organization’s unique requirements and reduce near- and long-term risk by better aligning the vendor’s technologies to the customer’s internal systems.”

Forward-deployed engineers are having a moment, with both Anthropic and OpenAI putting them at the forefront of their AI sales strategies.

But the concept isn’t new, said Matt Kimball, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “When I was a state government CIO back in the early 2000s, I leveraged what is now being called an FDE and it reduced a project from weeks to hours,” he said. FDEs should have the domain expertise to be able to “walk into an enterprise and look at all of these moving parts associated with activating AI and develop (and execute) a comprehensive plan of attack,” covering technology, operations, people, and processes, he said.

However, said Bill Wong, research fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, enterprise leaders need to recognize that while they have the option to procure services to accelerate adoption, they must take ultimate responsibility for what’s built by defining, staffing and applying an AI governance program, and adapting it as AI capabilities evolve.

Forward thinking

Gogia said that many CIOs will bring in forward-deployed engineers for perfectly good reasons: scarce skills, urgency, board pressure, messy legacy systems and a widening gap between AI aspiration and operational delivery, but they should not abdicate responsibility to them.

“Use forward-deployed engineers where they create speed, learning and operational discipline. Do not use them as substitutes for internal architecture, governance or accountability,” he said. “Make them teach, make them document, make them transfer capability, make them design for audit, exit, and resilience from day one. If the engagement leaves behind only working software, it has not done enough.”

This article first appeared on CIO.