Why are big AI companies embedding engineers with customers, and what does that mean?

Author - Enrique Dans

The fifth article reads the market’s behavior as evidence. If intelligence were already a utility, vendors would not need to send engineers into every customer to make it work. The rise of forward deployed engineers shows that the missing layer is still being supplied manually: someone has to reconstruct context, map workflows, define constraints, integrate systems, and translate organizational reality into something AI can operate within. This is not a sign of maturity. It is the preplatform phase of a category that has not yet found its industrial substrate. The article turns the FDE model into a diagnostic: enterprise AI has not yet become a platform because it still depends on artisanal translation.