Who really needs Forward Deployed Engineers around AI?

Companies are investing in Forward Deployed Engineers, or FDEs.

AWS has announced a $1 billion investment in a dedicated organization intended to embed thousands of engineers with customers.

OpenAI has established a dedicated Deployment Company and agreed to acquire Tomoro, adding approximately 150 FDEs and deployment specialists.

Microsoft has said it would hire 6,000 people and invest $3.5billion in its new AI delivery unit, according to CNBC.

But what should FDEs deliver, and what value do they really offer for customers? The FDE model is an evolution of how companies would previously work around projects with customers based on understanding the business and the technology involved, with a much higher expectation of hands-on engineering.

What has changed is the technology being deployed.

Where FDEs deliver value FDEs typically embed directly into a customer and work across multiple teams.

They identify a high-value workflow, understand the customer’s data and operational constraints and then work to build the required integrations and take the system from prototype into production.

For AI deployment, that involves more than connecting a model to an application.

This includes looking at the enterprise context and data available to the model, as well as evaluating accuracy, reliability and confidence thresholds.

It can also involve looking at the guardrails that should exist, the review and escalation process, security and observability.

It should also look at integration with existing workflows and business processes.

Companies need FDEs because companies want to deploy probabilistic systems into deterministic operating environments.

In other words, enterprises want to use systems that can be different each time they respond within business processes that depend on predictable and uniform results.