Microsoft’s next big bet isn’t on a model but on becoming the Swiss Army knife of enterprise AI

Microsoft is making a big bet on the adoption of its enterprise AI tools. 

The tech giant announced on Thursday that it is investing $2.5 billion in a new business unit, Microsoft Frontier, aimed at getting customers to better use its AI to transform their businesses and to address an area where many companies are struggling: delivering measurable outcomes and demonstrating a return on their AI investments.

In a blog post, Judson Althoff, head of the company’s commercial business, called Frontier “the largest, most capable, outcome-driven engineering organization in the industry.” The unit will consist of 6,000 so-called forward-deployed engineers, or industry experts who will work directly with customers.

Microsoft’s announcement comes days after Amazon said it would spend $1 billion on a similar FDE initiative and also follows OpenAI and Anthropic’s own multibillion-dollar FDE investments. 

Tech companies are keen to help enterprises figure out how to program AI services to fit their needs because of t...