AI talent gap leaves IT firms scrambling for forward deployed engineers

Indian IT companies are struggling to attract forward deployed engineers, who combine deep tech expertise with customer-facing skills and are in high demand amid increasing AI adoption, forcing them to improvise with multiple specialists instead to bridge the gap, experts said.

An FDE is an expert engineer who works closely with clients to customise and deploy software solutions at their sites. Most IT contracts now have terminology such as ‘co-located pods’, ‘embedded engineers’, ‘onsite AI leads’ which require an FDE-type talent, said Gaurav Parab, principal IT analyst at consultancy NelsonHall.

“IT firms have jumped to the FDE concept and diluted it,” said Yugal Joshi, partner at Everest Group. An FDE is “supposed to be deep tech talent of the same company who built a product, which was hard to use by the client on their own, and needed deep engineering talent to work with it,” he noted.


“But IT firms are now using technical consultants and solution architects, repurposing them as FDE to get higher billing rates.” While bundling “different roles as a single FDE” helps IT companies reduce their cost burden, this is resulting in “enterprises and clients not really getting what they are paying for,” Joshi said.