With the speed at which artificial intelligence (AI) has consumed strategic priorities and roadmaps of enterprise organizations across industries, AI servicing platforms such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have developed a specific role designed to support organizations in their AI transformation journey.
The forward deployed engineer (or FDE for short) partners closely with enterprise customers to help design, develop, and deploy AI-centric solutions that align to their business priorities. A role born to address the lack of internal exposure and knowledge of AI at client organizations, this particular role combines the customer-facing elements of a traditional business consultant with the technical expertise of a software engineer along with cloud domain knowledge of a solution architect.
The need for the inception of this combination of skills has become increasingly evident. Financial Times and Indeed's Hiring Lab found that the growth in the number of job listings for a forward-deployed engineer skyrocketed north of 800 percent between January and September of 2025.
What is a forward deployed engineer?
Typical responsibilities of an FDE generally revolve around leading the discovery of organizational AI opportunities, the design of solutions to meet customer needs, and the deployment of solutions for benefit realization.
The customer-facing nature of FDEs illustrate their proximity to conventional consulting responsibilities within tech-focused domains; however, traditional consulting engagements span several months or even years. Engagements where FDEs are utilized, however, can span from only a few weeks to just a couple months.
These AI-focused, hyper-speed, and high-impact engagements – projects where FDEs are utilized – provide a consummate illustration of providing an excellent customer experience (CX).
What defines excellence in CX?
When considering what defines excellence in CX, we are assessing what not only meets but also exceeds customer expectations.
This equates to gaining an intimate understanding of customer pain-points, possessing an acute awareness of the capabilities as well as the limitations of technical tooling, and interlocking those two elements to deliver a personalized solution to customers as quickly as possible in such a way that fosters loyalty and advocacy.
FDEs are fundamentally positioned to provide this depth of support to client organizations.
A specialized role to address a specific gap
There is an industry-agnostic shift taking place where organizations vary on the spectrum of AI adoption, utilization, and expertise to transform business processes.
AI and AI-adjacent platforms have created a targeted solution by way of a specialized engineering role to address this knowledge gap – investing in a role that marks the latest example of how CX-forward organizations adapt to the needs of customers in an effort to solve their challenges.
It will be interesting to see how this role, as well as service organizations as a whole, evolves as the shift into artificial intelligence manifests itself.
Quick links
- Fragmented organizational cognition is why CX programs stall
- The silent CX crisis – who gives a damn?
- Securing the contact center in the AI era: Prompt injection, consumer privacy, and data integrity