Accenture and Google are putting 1,000 engineers inside other companies, and the title they gave them says what they’re for. The two announced on September 8 a new Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group and a plan to build “a 1,000 forward deployed engineer (FDE) workforce to accelerate AI value for enterprises globally.”
A forward-deployed engineer isn’t a researcher and isn’t a salesperson. It’s someone sent into a client’s business to rebuild a workflow around an agent and stay on the hook for whether it works. The release’s own example is a customer-service deployment at YouTube that the companies say lifted customer sentiment 11 percent and cut average handle time 37 percent, their numbers, one client. Accenture says it already has nearly 50,000 Google Cloud-skilled people; this group is the one that goes on site.
We’d read past the thousand. What the release doesn’t say is what the deal costs either company, beyond calling it “a significant joint investment,” or what one of these engineers costs a client.