“We are working with partners on training, on competencies, on methodology, and approaches to really ensure that it is an FDE motion versus the same old business model that they were pursuing before,” Ruba Borno, AWS global channel chief.
AWS is doubling down on its $1 billion Forward Deployed Engineering investment by launching a “gamechanger” for partners to drive production agentic AI solutions for customers by creating new Partner FDE credentials, says AWS’ global channel chief.
“We are working with partners on training, on competencies, on methodology, and approaches to really ensure that it is an FDE motion versus the same old business model that they were pursuing before,” Ruba Borno (pictured), head of AWS global specialists and partners, tells CRN.
“There’s absolutely more demand than supply at the moment to be able to give customers these types of capabilities,” said Borno. “Partners have been really aggressive about investing in this capacity for their workforce.”
AWS is now giving partners a structured way to build and validate their FDE depth with three new Partner FDE pathways and credentials that recognize the skills required to deliver production agentic AI.
Available on AWS Skill Builder, it gives partners a structured way to build and prove capability in agentic AI delivery at the same standard that AWS’ own FDE teams are held to.
AWS’ Three New FDE Pathways
The three FDE pathways partners can access are: Ground, Orchestrate, and Prove.
The Gound pathway focuses on trusted enterprise data, systems, domain ontologies, and business context.
The Orchestrate pathway revolves around dependable agents, tools, workflows, identity, and recovery.
The Prove pathway focuses on evaluation, observability, security, policy, and human control.
Furthermore, each pathway has two different levers of credentials: FDE Validated and FDE Advanced.
AWS Partner: ‘We Are, Right Now, Helping AWS’ With FDE
Iselin, N.J.-based AWS Preimer Partner Intuitive.AI is ahead of the game when it comes to Forward Deployed Engineers.
“We are, right now, helping AWS with a number of FDE resources jointly co-investing and co-selling to the customers,” said Jay Modh, CEO of Intuitive.AI.
“Just in one month, the headcount we’ve deployed is about 42 FDEs who have been deployed on a number of very large-scale Fortune 100 projects,” Modh said.
Modh said AWS FDE pathways for partners are for solution providers with a deep understanding of the business tied to AI engineering skills. The goal is to give customers a reliable way to vet delivery capability and partners a credible way to demonstrate it.
“AWS adopting this FDE model is a great move and a very positive one for us,” he said.
How Partners Earn FDE Certifications
Partners earn these certifications via hands-on validation in AWS-provisioned environments, not solely through course completion or multiple-choice tests.
AWS said these are technical capability pathways, not separate delivery models or fixed job titles.
Credential attainment is based on what partners can demonstrate, not what courses they’ve completed.
As builders earn credentials and apply these capabilities, reusable connectors, domain ontologies, agent patterns, and operations tooling compound into a stronger delivery practice, Borno said.
“Production agentic AI requires depth across enterprise context, orchestration, and evaluation,” said Randall Hunt, CTO of AWS partner Caylent, in an email to CRN.
“The Partner FDE pathways give us a clear framework to develop those capabilities and bring the right expertise to each customer engagement,” he added.
FDE Customers Can Get ‘Value’ In 45 Days
In late June, AWS launched a dedicated $1 billion Forward Deployed Engineering organization aimed at embedding expert AI engineers directly inside customer teams.
“We are absolutely making a large $1 billion investment to do that ourselves, but also extending the approach, the learnings, the toolings, to our partners so that they can also deliver value to the customers that need it,” Borno said.
Furthermore, AWS launched a program this year for AWS employees working in collaboration with AWS partners around FDEs.
“It’s anchored on making sure that customers get value in 45 days. So we’ve anchored on this term of ‘Live in 45,” she said.
“We didn’t come up with this from scratch, out of the blue. We have worked with our Generative AI Innovation Center for years, shoulder to shoulder with our partners, doing co-delivery to support customers in actually embedding the engineers with our customers, making sure that they are able to build the right use cases, test them, and get value,” Borno said.
“And so now, we are turning that into a motion that we can extend with partners,” she said.
Seattle-based AWS generated $42.2 billion in total revenue during Q2 2026, pushing Amazon’s cloud unit to a record $169 billion annual run rate.
