The Vendors Are Moving In

Last week OpenAI certified 300,000 consultants. This week the rest of the industry made deployment the story. Microsoft launched Frontier, a 2.5 billion dollar unit with 6,000 engineers who embed directly inside enterprise clients. AWS committed 1 billion to the same forward-deployed model, and Anthropic and OpenAI already run consulting arms. The same week Microsoft funded 6,000 deployment experts, it cut 4,800 of its own jobs. The vendors stopped selling software and started selling people. This week: why the free deployment is not free, the three questions to ask before a vendor embeds with your team, and the year-two cost nobody puts in the pitch.