Amazon Web Services announced it will spend a billion dollars to create a new unit that embeds field deployment engineers with customers. The engineers will build AI solutions and leave behind self-sufficient teams in a matter of weeks. This is the corporate equivalent of dropping off a puppy at someone's house and promising it's housebroken.
The program assumes companies need AWS engineers physically present to figure out how to use AWS products. Which raises the question: if your cloud platform requires a billion-dollar missionary program to explain it, is it actually good? Or did you just build something so convoluted that customers need a Sherpa to navigate the console?
AWS says the teams will be self-sufficient in weeks. Self-sufficient at what, exactly? Calling AWS support? Reading documentation that should have existed before the product launched? The whole pitch sounds like a gym membership that comes with a trainer who promises you'll definitely keep working out after he leaves.
This is the growing wave they're joining. Microsoft did it. Google did it. Now AWS does it. Everyone's sending engineers to hold hands with enterprise customers who signed massive contracts and then realized they have no idea what they bought. It's like buying a submarine and then calling the salesman back to ask which end goes in the water.
The billion dollars could have gone toward making the products easier to use. Instead it's funding a small army of engineers who will sit in conference rooms explaining why the thing that should take five minutes actually takes five weeks and requires seventeen IAM roles.
Retail traders will see this headline and think AWS is innovating. They'll buy more Amazon stock and feel smart about it. They won't ask why a cloud company needs to physically deploy humans to explain computers. That would require thinking, and thinking is not part of the retail investment strategy.
The real innovation here is convincing customers that needing a dedicated babysitter is a premium service worth paying for.
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