Here’s one career emerging from the AI shift: ‘forward-deployed engineers’

Google currently has 1,513 openings for that specific role and OpenAI, which just this week launched an organization called the Deployment Company, has 31. Microsoft is on board, too; in March, it partnered with Accenture to launch a forward-deployment partnership.

OpenAI’s new Deployment Company is, not surprisingly, designed to “help organizations build and deploy AI systems they can rely on every day across their most important work,” the company said in a blog post.

Forward-deployed engineering has seen the fastest growth in jobs created by AI, with the number of positions increasing 42-fold between 2023 and 2025, LinkedIn reported in a study earlier this year. (AI engineer jobs, by comparison, have grown 13-fold in that same time frame.)

Vendors and service providers created the FDE position to help clients install AI, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J.Gold Associates.

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AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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