Last night, I joined Yu Yi and Wang Wei at
@geekpark
to discuss the rise of Forward Deployed Engineers.
Here’s my take: FDEs are booming not because models are still too weak, but because they’re finally strong enough. (Stronger than enterprise can imagine)
We used to think AI couldn’t make its way into enterprises because the intelligence wasn’t there yet. Now it’s becoming clear that the bottleneck has moved—from “can the model do the work?” to “does the organization know how to let it?”
Giving a company a model or an API doesn’t automatically create value. How roles are designed, how humans and agents divide the work, how permissions are granted, how workflows are rebuilt, and how learnings are retained—these are what determine whether AI can truly become part of the business.
So to me, FDE is neither on-site outsourcing nor simply helping customers install a product. It is a process of discovering the best organizational practices of the AI era together with customers, then encoding those practices back into the product and the agent team.
The best FDE practice shouldn’t grow linearly with every new customer. After each deployment, the next one should require fewer people—until the agent system can handle most of the deployment and evolution itself.
Model companies are creating intelligence. We want to turn intelligence into an organization. In a sense, this is what we mean by accelerating AGI’s transition into organizational intelligence.