Google's Israeli executive wants to eliminate the hottest job in tech today
The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role has become one of the most sought-after positions in tech. Now, Google, under the leadership of Israeli executive Andi Gutmans, is working to replace these specialists with AI agents.
One of the hottest roles in tech over the past year is the FDE, or Forward Deployed Engineer, whose job is to be in the field and help companies adopt AI tools. While the phenomenon did not start in labs like OpenAI or Anthropic, they were quick to join the trend, pushing demand for the role to new heights. Now, Google is trying to eliminate the role with the help of AI, and the person leading these efforts is an Israeli executive.
A role with a military context
Demand for FDEs has jumped by more than 1,000% over the last year. AI labs have realized that their bottleneck is no longer just training models, but the ability to implement them at customer sites. An FDE analyzes business problems, dives deep into the technology stack and codebase, and tailors tools to run in existing production environments. Giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are offering aggressive recruitment packages to attract thousands of these engineers.
The pioneer was the DeepTech giant Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel. The company coined the name, which sounds like a military role (inspired by the US Army's Delta Force), emphasizing the need for top-tier talent to successfully implement AI products.
The Israeli leading the change at Google
While Google plans to hire hundreds of FDEs for its Google Cloud division, a report by The Information reveals that the company is simultaneously promoting an internal process, led by Israeli executive Andi Gutmans, to replace FDEs with AI agents.
Gutmans, a Technion graduate and co-creator of the PHP language, joined Google Cloud in 2020. In an interview, he explained that the industry's "talent war" approach has limits. Organizations cannot hire enough people to utilize 100% of their business data. His solution is to give AI agents access to vast amounts of organizational data, including files and legal documents. Scanning this data allows agents to generate context-rich insights, saving thousands of hours of human engineering work.
The path to autonomy
Gutmans emphasizes that these agents are not yet fully independent and require human supervision. However, he estimates that a stage will come where they become completely autonomous, with humans only needing to intervene occasionally to approve actions.
Google is not the only player in this space. Palantir is also using AI to reduce the number of engineers sent to customer sites. Furthermore, Israeli entrepreneur Efrat Rapoport recently unveiled a startup called June AI, which also aims to replace the FDE role. The startup has already secured $20 million in Pre-Seed funding from investors including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Dell founder Michael Dell.
