The most expensive mistake in enterprise AI right now: treating FDEs as your whole transformation plan. Forward deployed engineers (FDEs) are important for custom deployments, but they won’t fix the change management issue most enterprises are facing. It’s likely more the former that Anthropic and OpenAI will continue to prioritize (and hire into the thousands, who knows). Beyond performance and cost, it’s systems integration, ROI, and literal usefulness that drive revenue and stickiness. *However* External FDEs, in my opinion, will not make your company an AI-first company. You can have the sleekest multi-agent orchestrations and still have the majority of your employee base hating AI, avoiding AI, and distrusting leadership decisions on AI. And we already know this because we see this in traditional SaaS too: you can customize the heck out of your Salesforce deployment, but that doesn’t mean your sales team will improve their data hygiene or even attempt to change the way they track and grow with it. Buying a fancier car doesn’t mean you magically learn to drive better overnight. If you’re an enterprise exec and FDEs are sold as the immediate and sole solution to your company transformation woes, walk away. It’s the combination of tech *and* people enablement *and* process reinvention that compounds into actual business outcomes. Large complex enterprises will stall out if they only prioritize the first.