After spending billions building artificial intelligence, Big Tech is now spending heavily to build the human workforce needed to prove the investments are paying off.
Companies are scrambling to find specialized AI engineers who can put the technology to work inside businesses. These specialists — called forward deployed engineers, or FDEs — combine advanced AI and software expertise with an understanding of how corporations operate. They could be the key humans in the loop required to turn powerful large language models into enterprise systems that can deliver measurable business results.
Market concerns that the economics of the AI boom are not sustainable have intensified this week with many top AI-themed and memory-themed stocks from Dell to CoreWeave, AMD and Micron suffering significant short-term losses.
Amazon Web Services has committed $1 billion to a forward-deployed engineering initiative. OpenAI has launched a deployment business backed by more than $4 billion in initial investment. Anthropic is putting $100 million into a program to train 10,000 forward-deployed engineers by the end of 2027. And Accenture and Google Cloud are building a 1,000-person forward-deployed engineering workforce.
"The Street is starting to become impatient with these billions of companies who are spending on AI without getting any business outcomes," said Jeff Christian, founder of executive search firm Christian & Timbers.