Sunday, November 01, 2026

What is a forward-deployed engineer? - McKinsey

Interest in forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs, has surged in recent months as companies try to get real value from AI. The term may be a buzzword for a service that consulting firms and technology providers have offered for years: embedding engineers at a client’s company, inside its systems and data, to build software alongside the people who will use it. As the AI era gets underway, companies are finding that off-the-shelf AI tools often don’t fit their specific needs. Getting real value from them means adapting tools to a specific business problem and helping teams change how they work. An FDE does both, which is why this form of collaboration seems particularly well suited for business today. In this video Explainer, McKinsey’s Holger Hürtgen, Martin Harrysson, and Nick Robson set out what an FDE does and how AI has changed the job. 

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