Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE): Driving AI adoption

Job postings for “Forward Deployed Engineer” (FDE) are up hundreds of per cent in the past year. Anthropic is arguably driving that shift more than anyone. It’s built its own applied AI engineering function to work directly with clients, treating hands-on deployment support as core to how it drives adoption and renewal, and it leans on partners like Version 1 to extend that reach further. AWS has committed a billion dollars to build out a team of its own. Microsoft has gone further again, launching a business built on thousands of people embedded inside client organisations.

I lead Version 1’s FDE team, so I’m talking about this a lot with clients, partners and internal teams right now.

Strip away the job title and it’s simple: an FDE is there to make sure an organisation realises business value from its investment in AI. They’re deep AI experts who advise clients directly on how to get there. It’s part technical delivery, part change management, part translation between what the technology can do and what a business needs from it.

The frontier labs have realised that handing someone a licence isn’t enough. We’ve all seen it where you roll out a tool, adoption stalls and twelve months later you haven’t realised the value. The model was never the problem; it was the deployment.

AI is the single biggest strategic priority for virtually every large organisation right now, and getting adoption right is what determines whether they realise that value or not. That’s what you’re getting when you invest in an FDE.

FDEs are seasoned professionals whose experience spans deep technical credibility, consulting skill and change management expertise. You’re investing in someone who has already driven AI transformation elsewhere and knows what moves the needle inside a team. That first-hand, proven experience is what turns a few weeks of hands-on work into change that sticks, rather than another rollout that stalls.

Is FDE just rebranding existing capability?

No, whilst our people have been embedded inside client organisations for three decades helping them realise value from technology investments, the FDE role is specific to AI adoption. An FDE isn’t a software engineer with a new title. It’s a senior trusted adviser with proven experience of driving real AI transformation, and that’s the only bar that qualifies someone for it.

That relentless focus on delivering business value from IT investment and our classleading approach to enabling AI transformation hasn’t gone unnoticed. Anthropic accepted us as one of its first partners globally, from a pool of roughly 40,000 applicants, and we remain one of only six preferred service partners in Europe. That’s shaped how closely we work with them and how early we see where the technology is going.

What does an FDE engagement look like in practice?

That spans everything from advising the C-suite on AI strategy, governance and use case selection, using our REACH framework to manage the change involved, through to the hands-on work of teaching engineering teams agentic development practices, or non-technical teams how to get real value from tools like Claude Cowork.

At an organisational level, our FDEs guide our clients on their AI strategy, helping them to pivot to an AI native organisation. How do we effect a change management process: how do we transform systems, business processes and value streams, and ultimately how do we reimagine what the business does. One of our insurance customers, Foundation Risk Partners, is a good example of this. We helped them become an AI driven organisation, delivering $10m of EBITDA uplift and cutting cycle times by 90%, making them more efficient than their competitors and better placed to win more business as a result.

That hands-on element matters because handing someone a licence alone without enabling them and considering the change management process rarely delivers transformational results. We see this with engineering teams, where we teach agentic practices to speed up delivery and use tools like Claude Cowork to automate the manual, repetitive work that eats into people’s day. Either way, it’s a journey we walk with the team, not a one-off session.

Who should this matter to?

AI is impacting all parts of our customers’ businesses, and it is the number one strategic priority for almost every organisation. If you are accountable for ensuring an AI investment delivers its intended value – whether as a CIO, IT director, or leader in HR, finance or another business function, you should be exploring how FDE could help make AI adoption stick. Yes, FDE might be the latest tech services buzzword, but someone must own the gap between buying the technology and your teams deploying it correctly.