Why are big AI companies embedding engineers with customers, and what does that mean?

The promise of frontier AI has always sounded like a utility: abundant intelligence, available on demand, as easy to access as electricity, water, or cloud computing. The metaphor is powerful, and for good reason. Utilities scale because they abstract complexity away. You don’t need an engineer from the power company sitting in your office every time you turn on the lights. And yet, the most sophisticated AI companies in the world are increasingly doing something very different: they are sending people.