The rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer

There is a new job title spreading rapidly through the AI industry: Forward Deployed Engineer, or FDE.

/Part 1

A recent piece by Vinoo Ganesh, who has built forward-deployed functions at Palantir, Citadel and Kepler, is revealing because it exposes how loosely the term is being used. At one dinner that Ganesh recalls, FDEs from Snowflake, Anthropic and other startups were using the same two words to describe roles ranging from a second-call sales engineer, to a quota-carrying representative who writes Python, to something much closer to a consultant with a laptop and a statement of work.

That ambiguity matters because the growth of FDE teams tells us something important about enterprise AI.

The industry is discovering what anyone who has spent enough time delivering transformation already knows: technology rarely survives contact with an actual organisation in the form in which it was sold.

The model may work and the demo may be spectacular, but what often does not exist in the product is the customer's operating context - the undocumented processes, exceptions, workarounds and institutional knowledge that determine whether something actually works inside a real organisation.

That is the gap FDEs are being hired to bridge.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Ganesh makes an important distinction between a genuine FDE function and consulting: the FDE should turn what it learns in the field into product improvements that make subsequent deployments faster, cheaper and more repeatable. When that feedback loop works, forward deployment can be a powerful product-development mechanism rather than an expensive services layer.

The problem comes when that distinction disappears.

If a vendor needs highly skilled people embedded in your organisation to make its product deliver the promised outcome, that tells you something about the maturity and generalisability of the product. You should therefore understand which part of the value proposition you are actually paying for.

#AI #EnterpriseAI #DigitalTransformation #TechnologyStrategy

https://lnkd.in/gNGDRBwd