The AI adoption puzzle is far from solved, as data safety issues, mounting costs and talent shortages plague enterprise efforts to scale use cases. Technology vendors and consulting firms mobilized to provide hands-on customer support this year under the banner of forward deployed engineers. The jury’s out on its immediate value.
Gartner expects the current wave of FDE interventions to fall short. Roughly 70% of vendor-led AI engineering excursions will be abandoned by 2028, according to the analyst firm, which used IT services company data, client consultations and proprietary modeling to assess the FDE landscape.
“Many providers now use ‘forward deployed’ as a label for implementation, professional services, solution engineering or AI consulting; some thoughtfully, others because it sounds more strategic,” Mukul Saha, Gartner senior director analyst said in a brief published Tuesday. “Some charge premium fees without the delivery depth, program management, or change management maturity to justify them.”
Gartner estimates that the bill for FDE consulting fees alone could top $200,000 quarterly per use case. Encouraged by early progress, customers that fail to develop internal engineering skills may end up paying “premium rates for work that, once the scope is clear, a traditional services or partner model could potentially deliver more cost-effectively and with more predictable results.”
Vendor hype has clouded the conversation, as vendors commit to numbers that may be hard to achieve. There are currently 2,000 active FDEs, Saha told Channel Dive. “Demand is probably quadruple that, so there aren’t enough engineering resources available,” he added.
Big promises
As the FDE buzz intensified, vendors made major commitments to expanding their AI engineering practices.
In May, Google Cloud put out a call for FDEs, circulating multiple job postings for 59 distinct roles in the U.S. and locations abroad. “If you are a builder who wants to work on the world’s largest stages and be at the center of the agentic era — join us,” the hyperscaler’s CEO Thomas Kurian said on LinkedIn.
AWS said it would invest $1 billion to roll out a dedicated FDE unit in June and Microsoft spent $2.5 billion to create an AI deployment division in July, promising to send 6,000 engineers into the field to help customers operationalize AI.
FDE enthusiasm spilled over into the channel in early September, as Accenture expanded its Google Cloud-based Gemini Business Group with the aim of adding 1,000 AI deployment specialists to its ranks. In August, managed service provider Lemongrass touted FDEs as the latest feature in its SAP ERP migration practice.
For the time being, some vendor commitments may be aspirational. DXC Technology, an IT services and consulting firm, announced in June that it would work with Anthropic to train tens of thousands of Claude-certified FDEs. As of July 31, the company had 86 on the books and was operating in 57 customer environments, DXC CEO Raul Fernandez told investors during an earnings call.
Gartner sees potential for these initiatives when expectations are kept in check and the services are well governed. “If you truly have the right FDE model, we see it bringing good outcomes,” Saha said. “But the type of resources you’re going to need to get this sort of engagement done are very particular, high-caliber resources.”
Software provider Palantir, the company widely credited with creating the FDE framework, has tested the model’s mettle.
“Palantir is a very interesting case,” said Saha. “They have worked with a lot of high-profile government clients, which needed to bring in top-notch resources to get jobs done in a short period of time, and so now we’re trying to replicate that for everybody.”
Channel inroads
FDE capabilities bear a striking resemblance to partner-led consulting, integration and management services. While partners should monitor the FDE situation, the market for AI implementation services isn’t likely to shift away from the channel, according to Saha.
“If you’re a product vendor, you don’t want a large team of consultants sitting on the bench bleeding money,” he said. “You also don’t want to burn the bridges with the partners who know the customer contacts and have those existing relationships. You’re better off educating and training your partners to help them become better at AI deployment.”
Anthropic and OpenAI both reached out to partners for AI enablement assistance earlier this year and the three big hyperscalers remained committed to maintaining their channel ecosystems. In July, Microsoft added Frontier Transformation Engineer to its technical certifications in an effort to upskill partners in FDE methodologies.
Most of the larger AI vendors are creating standardized credentials for FDEs, Saha said.
Partners are particularly well suited to bringing deployment expertise to midmarket organizations eager to share in the potential spoils of AI modernization.
“The MSP channel will be the forward deployed engineers for small and midsize businesses,” Craig Donovan, COO of technology marketplace Pax8, told Channel Dive.
The company is using FDEs to help its MSP clients spin up practices they can take to customers.
“We’re just going to offer up some of our own forward deployed engineers that will wear the shirt, if you will, of the MSP until they’re ready to step into that space,” said Donovan. “It’s just a helping hand that helps our partners activate a little bit faster.”
Somebody has to pave the way to a return on AI investments, Saha stressed.
“Product companies want to make their product sticky,” he said. “They want to be able to show good numbers to Wall Street investors. The honeymoon period after a contract is signed is not that long. You want to go in there, get the work done and showcase the value right away because competition is fierce.”
