Microsoft Just Spent $2.5 Billion to Admit Something: Most Companies Are Bad at Actually Using AI.
Here's an uncomfortable truth the AI industry doesn't say out loud often enough: buying a model subscription doesn't automatically produce a return. Most enterprises have moved past the "let's experiment with AI" phase and landed somewhere much less comfortable, stuck trying to prove the investment was worth it. Microsoft's answer is a new business unit called Microsoft Frontier Company, backed by $2.5 billion and staffed with 6,000 engineers and industry specialists who will embed directly inside client organizations. Not consultants who show up for a workshop and leave a slide deck. Engineers who sit inside the business and build the thing. CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business Judson Althoff is positioning this as bigger than the "Forward Deployed Engineer" model that companies like Palantir made famous, calling it the largest, most capable outcome-driven engineering organization in the industry. That's a big claim, and it comes with a...
