There is a wave of content right now about the forward deployed engineer model for AI (FDE), and from my perspective most of the posts get it largely right. The consulting and services opportunity is real for those who understand the principles underlying agentic AI at scale. Some of these firms are going to do genuinely transformative work.
But an element of the landscape rarely makes it into these posts.
Some of us have seen this pattern before: ERP rollouts, cloud migrations, digital transformation. Every major technology wave produced a surge of services providers who knew the vocabulary, passed the certifications, and won the engagements. Some delivered. Plenty left behind fragile, costly implementations that enterprises are still untangling years later.
AI agents raise the stakes considerably.
When a poorly configured ERP module misfired, you felt it in one system. When an agent is embedded across production workflows, supply chain decisions, marketing automation, and customer-facing interactions simultaneously, operating with real autonomy, a bad implementation does not stay contained. It compounds.
Because these systems generate outputs that look authoritative, the errors often go undetected until the damage is already material.
The firms that will actually earn their place here are not the ones who can articulate an agentic framework or demo a compelling proof of concept. They are the ones who bring genuine domain expertise alongside the technical capability. People who deeply understand how decisions actually get made on a manufacturing floor, in a procurement cycle, in a customer service escalation path.
That grounded, operational knowledge gives the ability to anticipate where an agent will break under real-world conditions, not just controlled ones.
The FDE who does not have that contextual depth is a liability at scale. Enthusiasm and technical fluency are not a substitute for earned insight.
The opportunity is real. So is the risk of a generation of enterprise leaders discovering too late that they handed significant operational leverage to partners who understood the technology but not the business they were transforming.
Due diligence on the humans behind these engagements has never mattered more.
Get new articles from Robin Green delivered directly.
Insights on AI leadership, the future of work, and human collaboration. No noise. Unsubscribe any time.
Subscribe free