A billion dollars of engineers, pointed at your customers

AWS has announced a billion dollars for forward deployed engineering. That means AI focused engineers, working out in end user customer environments, deploying capability that generates a return on the AI investments those customers have already made.

A lot of people in the channel read that as the hyperscalers coming for partner services revenue. I think that is the right conclusion from the wrong reasoning, and the reasoning matters if you want to do something useful about it.

The money is already spent

All the hyperscalers, and in fact the frontier labs, have invested enormous sums into AI infrastructure. Hundreds of billions of dollars.

There is still a lag in terms of clear return on investment in the end user customer. The spend happened, the results have not arrived, and the pressure to demonstrate those results is real and immediate.

The channel was the obvious route, and has been slow

The partner channel is the natural way for that capability to reach customers. Partners hold the relationships, and traditionally the vendor built the capability while the partner was responsible for service delivery and implementation. There were exceptions for very large accounts, but that was the pattern.

What has happened is that the channel has been slow to build the capability that turns AI infrastructure into a demonstrable outcome for an end user. Not unwilling. Slow.

So the vendors are now making investments to crystallise that return themselves.

Why this one is different

We have all watched vendors go direct before, and watched them pull back a few quarters later when the numbers or the leadership changed. It is a fair instinct to assume this is the same cycle.

The thing that is different this time is pace. When AWS released a service, or Microsoft announced that Exchange on premise was being retired in favour of Office 365, those changes were relatively manageable. You could train a team and catch up.

The speed at which AI capabilities are evolving is not comparable to that, and the vendors cannot afford to wait for the channel to catch up, because they have sunk the investment already.

What I would actually do

The primary thing is this: you must get your skates on and start building and delivering these services. I know that trivialises some real challenges. It is still the answer, and it is a bit of fire, ready, aim.

Underneath that, the practical work is your go to market.

The channel has always sold first and worked out how to deliver second, and there is nothing new in that. What matters is whether you have a clear go to market offer in this space, whether everyone in your team understands what it is and how to sell it, and whether it is being sold consistently.

If you do not have a clear services catalogue around this, you are in trouble and you need to address it straight away.

The open door

Here is the part that has nothing to do with the hyperscalers.

If you have an existing customer and you are not talking to them about this, and not doing solutioning and scenarios with them, that is an open door. Another partner walks in and says they are the expert in the things your provider is not providing, while you keep refreshing their email system.

The vendors would not be filling this gap if the channel were addressing it.

Where 1KE fits

Over the last eighteen months we have been building an AI pre-sales autopilot. It ingests information about the customer context and the problem, understands the channel partner's own business, capabilities and rate card, and uses both to generate solutions almost in real time, grounded in the customer and in what the partner can actually deliver.

The reason that is relevant here is the first problem I described. If you are standing up services that are relatively new to your organisation, and you want to enable everyone in your sales and pre-sales team quickly, that is a place where we can help you scale fast.

You still need to be confident your delivery can meet the promises being made. But at this point what you mostly need is to be out there having the conversations, with promises that are sensible and grounded.

The one message

The hyperscalers are going into your customer base, or they are planning to. So are the frontier labs. Your competitors always have been.

What changed is the cadence and the speed. Get your skates on, be out there selling these services now, and make sure you can scale the way your sales, pre-sales and delivery teams do it.

Watch the full conversation with Sidney on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PiPPOZ8hpbI

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About 1KE:

1KE is the presales autopilot for technical sales teams. It turns discovery calls, emails, and technical documents into structured requirements and customer-ready solutions in minutes, so teams can respond while the deal is still warm.

Learn more → https://1ke.ai

Michael → https://linkedin.com/in/michaelchanter/ · https://x.com/1keceo

Sidney → https://linkedin.com/in/sidneyminassian/

Follow 1KE → https://linkedin.com/company/1ke-ai/

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