AI engineer vs. forward deployed engineer: Which role delivers the most business value?

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

Postings for forward-deployed engineers grew by 1,165% last year.
Some AI leaders say AI engineers are in a more valuable role.
Ultimately, the role that matters is one that brings value to the business.

You may have been hearing a lot of buzz lately about the role of forward deployed engineer (FDE) as a career option. But how viable an option is it? Among industry experts, opinions are mixed.

The number of job postings with the job title “forward deployed engineer,” tracked through 2025, grew by 1,165% over the previous year, according to estimates compiled by Henley Wing Chiu, chief technology officer of Revealera. Top responsibilities of FDEs include working directly with customers, building and deploying AI and machine-learning systems, and integrating systems and APIs.

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FDEs embed themselves with customers and users, helping promote and implement AI. “Forward-deployed engineering is a strong path for people who want to work closer to real customer problems,” said Shruti Tyagi, senior manager of problem management at ServiceNow. “In enterprise AI, the challenge is often not just building the AI solution. It is making it work inside existing workflows, security requirements, approval processes, data issues, and adoption challenges.”

However, one prominent AI expert says FDEs have limited roles, and the broader emerging category of AI engineers has the most career potential for tech professionals. AI engineers are actually where AI-driven job growth is taking place, argues Andrew Ng, founder of DeepLearning.AI, chairman and co-founder of Coursera, and an adjunct professor at Stanford University.

FDEs may lock organizations into single vendors and models, whereas AI engineers operate within a broader realm, Ng stated in a recent post. “Right now, I see surging demand for AI engineers who can build software applications using AI software components (like LLM prompts, agentic frameworks, evals, etc.) and effectively use AI coding agents (like Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity CLI, and OpenCode).”

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Leaders across the industry agree in principle with Ng’s premise, but caution that the AI space is changing so rapidly that it’s difficult to calibrate one’s skills. “Andrew Ng frames this as a numbers question, and on the numbers, he’s right,” said Brandon Sammut, chief people and AI transformation officer at Zapier. “There will be more AI engineer roles than FDE roles, because most companies want their own people building their own systems rather than a few embedded specialists. If you’re optimizing for how many open jobs exist, AI engineer wins.”

AI engineer is the better path as “this specialist has a deeper understanding of the technology they’ll eventually need to implement,” agreed Vasily Mazin, chief research officer and co-founder at Mind Simulation Lab. “It’s simply a stronger foundation to build on. If an AI engineer also has strong communication skills, the ability to explain complex things clearly, and an analytical mindset that lets them see where AI solutions fit into a company’s specific problems…they can easily step into an FDE role and do well in it, ideally without losing their technical edge and keeping a pulse on how AI is evolving. Going the other direction — from FDE to engineer — is much harder.”

Not everyone agrees that FDEs have a limited scope, however. “AI engineers build the engine, but it is the forward-deployed engineer who is figuring out where that car should go,” said Dan Herbatschek, CEO and founder at Ramsey Theory Group. “Looking to the future, knowing the destination is becoming far more valuable than knowing how the engine works. Part of this reason is that AI is just getting easier to build. Each month, the models are getting better, the tools are easier to use, and most of the heavy lifting on the technical side is automated. FDEs are valuable because they sit at the intersection of tech, operations, and business outcomes.”

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At the same time, “don’t optimize to become an AI engineer or a forward-deployed engineer,” Herbatschek advises. “Optimize to become irreplaceable by learning AI deeply, but also have a strong background in finance, operations, product, customer experience, and organizational change. The highest salaries will be for those individuals who know how to make models into ROI.”

Sammut also pushed back on the premise that one role may be more valuable than another. “Integration complexity is the number one barrier to making AI work in practice, ahead of budget or model quality,” he said. “Whether your title says FDE or AI engineer, the person who can close that gap keeps getting hired. It’s the ability to sit with a team, figure out what they’re actually trying to solve, and build something that survives contact with their real systems. That’s the skill in short supply.”

An AI engineer may be a suitable career pursuit for “someone who wants deeper technical specialization,” said Tyagi. “Forward-deployed engineer is a great path for someone who enjoys customer-facing problem-solving, ambiguity, and connecting technical work to business outcomes.”

The debate between FDE and AI engineer may even grow mute as AI progresses. ‘The debate assumes that the future of AI will be defined primarily by building and deploying models,” said Ismail Amla, senior vice president of Kyndryl Consult at Kyndryl. “In reality, a third category of roles is emerging that may prove just as critical: designing how humans and AI work together.”

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Such a role — what Amla calls a human systems architect — is tasked with helping determine “where human judgment remains essential, how exceptions are handled, and how accountability is maintained” as AI takes on greater decision-making. Importantly, “as much as 30% of critical decision logic resides as tacit knowledge rather than documented processes,” he added. “The lesson is that AI expertise remains valuable, but the highest-growth opportunities may increasingly belong to those who can bridge disciplines.”

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Bree Lambert

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Recent Reviews

You’re waiting for a Blu-ray release that may never come—2026 is the format’s official downfall

I am a recent convert to physical media — yet even as someone getting back into buying discs in 2026, I haven’t been buying Blu-rays. Like many Americans, I still pick up DVDs instead. These aren’t great times for the Blu-ray format, and don’t expect a turnaround in 2026.

Fewer new releases make their way to Blu-ray

More media is now released exclusively for streaming

Blu-ray has been around for two decades, but it never managed to fully replace, or even overtake, the DVD format it was designed to supersede. We still can’t take for granted that our favorite movies, let alone TV shows, will eventually see a Blu-ray release.

The movies most likely to come to Blu-ray are the ones that hit theaters, but a growing amount of cinema is designed exclusively with streaming platforms in mind. I recently rewatched Mississippi Masala, which led me to check in on what work Sarita Choudhury has done over the decades since. A film called Evil Eye released in 2020 caught my eye. Unfortunately, it’s only available via Prime Video. There’s no Blu-ray or even a DVD. In contrast, it’s easy to watch Michael B. Jordan in Sinners on Blu-ray, since that movie came to theaters last year.

You could say that it makes sense that a movie with a 4.8/10 rating on IMDb doesn’t see a physical release, but in the heyday of physical video, store shelves were stacked not only with just the big-budget bangers but plenty of straight-to-DVD movies as well. Now those films exist to pad out streaming catalogs instead.

Fewer big box stores stock their shelves with physical discs

Blu-ray discs have disappeared from some stores entirely

The format’s demise is striking. I frequent my local Best Buy quite often and don’t see any movies on display. That’s because the retailer stopped selling movies in stores several years ago. Walmart still sells them, but the selection is a fraction of what you could find ten or twenty years ago. The audience has been reduced down to the shrinking number of people whose internet at home can’t handle streaming and those who might think of themselves as collectors.

If you venture onto Reddit and visit r/Blu-ray, you will find more threads about thrift store hauls and older collections than excitement over the latest new release. Don’t get me wrong — I, too, am very excited about seeing what gems I can snag for only a couple bucks, but this shows the challenge retailers face. Increasingly, only enthusiasts are prepared to drop over $20 on a disc.

I’m not buying discs to stick them in a player

Phone on a stand playing a Netflix video

The simple truth is that most people don’t want to buy physical media. Discs don’t fit in phones, and the drives are no longer available in most laptops. Even desktop PCs lack a place to put a disk. I recently built a PC for the first time in part to digitize my media library, and I rely on an external DVD drive connected via USB. Yes, DVD, not Blu-ray. A smaller file size combined with upscaling is easier on my hard drive.

Retro nostalgia hasn’t helped Blu-ray in the same way it has aided vinyl. This is in part because most people simply don’t care all that much about video quality. Most are streaming video on Netflix and YouTube at middling settings on small screens, and many of us are acclimated to mid-range phone speakers, compared to which even the subpar built-in speakers on modern TVs sound like a huge step-up. It’s hard to convince large numbers of people to purchase an expensive version of a movie in a format that requires thousands of dollars of home media equipment to truly appreciate.

4K Ultra HD is in an even worse position

It’s been a decade, yet few people own these discs

The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray format is an enhancement, rather than a replacement, of the Blu-ray discs that first appeared in 2006. Debuting in 2016, the 4K Ultra HD format supports the max resolution of a 4K TV.

4K TVs were still somewhat of a novelty ten years ago, but they’re cheap and commonplace today. Still, people aren’t demanding 4K-quality Blu-ray movies as a result. These discs are still less common than 1080p ones, which are themselves still outnumbered by DVDs.

This isn’t merely a matter of consumers preferring the cheaper option. Often, 4K simply isn’t a choice, or it’s one that arrives significantly later, like the Switch port of a PC title. Some recent films, like Exit 8, are slated to see a physical release over the summer yet will still be in 1080p when they do. Adoption of the newest format has been that slow.

The industry isn’t helping itself, either. 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray discs come with DRM and aren’t easy to play on a modern PC, further limiting potential growth. They do not want anyone pirating these super high-quality versions. When you consider that some of these 4K Blu-rays have an AI upscaling problem, you’re paying more for what may not even be the best version.

Blu-ray is seeing fewer releases, is available in fewer places, and is less accessible in the ways many of us want to watch TV shows and movies in 2026. With our portable devices getting better and internet speeds getting faster, it’s hard to see physical video staging a turnaround, even if we’re still a long way off from it going away entirely.

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