The FDE title might be new, but the theory is as old as computers themselves.

If you’ve followed tech news this summer, you’ve almost certainly come across the term Forward Deployed Engineer or, in short, FDE. On June 30, AWS announced a massive $1 billion investment in a new unit built around this one role. OpenAI had already put more than $4 billion behind its own Deployment Company in May. There’s no end to the news on FDE. All of this for just one role.

So, who are they? A forward deployed engineer is an engineer embedded directly in a customer’s environment to design, build and ship AI or custom software solutions. Palantir, which made the title popular, describes the difference well. A regular engineer builds “one capability, many customers.” An FDE delivers “one customer, many capabilities.”

Companies have put engineers close to customers for decades. In the 1950s and 60s, IBM sent systems engineers to sit with customers alongside its mainframes, writing code and configuring the machine — all of it included in the price of the hardware until IBM started charging for it separately at the end of the 60s. Later, consultants embedded themselves inside client organizations, and implementation teams worked side by side with business users.

Because the way enterprise software gets built has changed, and the FDE is the role that fits the new way of building. 

Across years, the best way to describe the business and IT relationship was like a client and vendor. Business teams gave the requirement.

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