FDE May Be the Shortest-Lived Hot Job of the AI Era: An Experiment in Conflicting Interests in Enterprise Delivery

The author argues that FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer) is more likely a transitional business strategy for AI vendors competing for enterprise customers, rather than a long-term standard model for enterprise AI delivery. The article points out that FDE relies on original vendor certification and technical support, lacks the incentive to recommend competitors' SOTA solutions, and may not have cross-platform evaluation capabilities, thus creating a delivery paradox: if delivery succeeds, the long-term necessity of FDE should decline; if it remains irreplaceable, then whether delivery is successful needs to be re-examined. The article cites a Gartner forecast that by 2028, 70% of enterprises will abandon Agentic AI built by vendor FDEs, and offers five questions for enterprises to judge whether delivery is successful.