The forward deployed engineer seems like it is the hottest job title in enterprise AI right now. A lot of revenue leaders still classify it under "engineering problem” and that is where I see a problem.
An FDE sits inside the customer's business, learns how it makes money, and builds until the thing works in production.
What that means concretely is that it describes onboarding, solution selling, adoption and expansion in one person. It describes the customer journey after the signature, the stretch where I see most B2B revenue being actually won or lost.
In my opinion, the question for a CRO isn't so much about if they should hire engineers but rather about who owns the last stretch between a signed contract and realised value.
Right now, in so many companies, the situation is like this: nobody does.
The FDE owns the last mile of the customer journey
The conversations happening right now are being shaped by engineers, recruiters and AI vendors. I see that Commercial teams are largely absent from those. Which is absolutely a paradox, as the role sits on their side of the customer journey.
The FDE exists because AI products don't sell themselves into production. The cause, as always, is messy data, workflows that don't connect, alerts that arrive too late…
That's is actually a revenue problem (even though it can initially be seen as an engineering problem). Every stalled pilot is a deal that closed but that never turned into recurring value. Later, it shows up as a churned logo, a shrunk renewal, an expansion that doesn’t happen.
I recently chatted with an FDE that summed up the job nicely and 2 items that they listed really stood out for me:
1. "Learn how the customer makes money."
2. “Share what you learn on site with your product team, so the next customer gets a better product.”
Two of them should make every CRO sit up! The first is value selling and the second is the feedback loop most GTM organisations promise but very few actually run.
At Cremanski we're experienced revenue operators. We help software and services companies and PE firms grow revenue and EBITDA by building an AI-driven GTM operating system: designed with your team, run until it holds, and improved every quarter. The FDE is a powerful new component in that operating system. It plugs into the gap between sales, solutions engineering and customer success, exactly where handovers tend to break.
If you plug it in well, you get faster time to value, cleaner expansion signals and a product that improves with every deployment.
Five moves for revenue leaders
1. Put the FDE on the customer journey map. Decide where the role enters (late stage deal, kickoff, first workflow live) and where it hands over. If you can't draw it on your journey, you can't measure it.
2. Measure the value delivered. Track time to first workflow live, adoption by the customer's own team and expansion pipeline sourced from deployments. Utilisation is a services metric. It tells you nothing about revenue.
3. Wire the feedback loop into RevOps. What FDEs learn on site belongs in your CRM as structured data: use cases, blockers, expansion signals. Otherwise it lives in one person's head and leaves with them.
4. Build handover into the contract. Make enablement and capability transfer a named deliverable. The customer should be able to tune their own agents within a defined period. That protects the renewal and keeps your FDEs scalable.
5. Let commercial leaders define the guardrails. Approval gates, discount limits and escalation rules for agents are revenue policy. Write them before the build starts, then let your engineers implement them.
All of this requires someone senior to treat the FDE as part of the revenue engine and design around it accordingly.
The title might change but I don’t think the job will.
In 2 years the market may call it something else. Things move so fast.
Whatever the label, the job will stay: someone has to turn a signed contract into working value inside the customer's business, then turn that value into the next deal.
The companies that win will build that job into their GTM operating system from day one. They'll know who owns it, how it's measured and how its learnings flow back into sales, product and customer success.
