Jason M. Lemkin argues AI agents need dedicated human engineers to work. A Forward Deployed Engineer embeds with customers to tune and launch agents on day one. One $3 million deal achieved 100% success with an FDE, versus the 5% success rate of typical AI deployments in 2024.
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I think what's different today is the agent will fail without training and onboarding this product. It, it, it will fail. Like it will never, it will never work. So it, it becomes an imperative if you wanna win. Like you need, I, I, you, this term's been bandied about too much, but you need a team of humans. We can call them forward deployed engineers that make 100% sure that when the agent is turned on, it's awesome. That's your job as a founder. Make sure it's awesome. Versus in the old days, even when I built one of the first e-signature services, it was so easy to use. We'd have some customers take them 2 years to go live. Big customers. That's just not okay in the age of AI, right?
Yeah. And these forward deploy engineers, is that just another name for sales engineer or is that a different sort of background?
It can be. And I think all this nomenclature is confusing, man. All this orchestration and ingestion. I think we're, we're confu— like Palantir is obviously the single most successful public B2B company at the moment, right? Maybe, maybe Databricks and a few others will beat them. In the next wave of IPOs. But their idea for forward deployed engineers is similar, but these are 9-figure deals. Most of us aren't doing $100 million deals. So the idea that you'll have Gary Tan and an army of folks out in the office for 6 months getting the software to work, that, that, that sort of inspires the idea. But it's really, sure, it could be a sales engineer or a solution architect, but the difference is the SEs that a lot of us worked with in the days were resources. And often they're like, There was also a classic resource of like 8 sales reps to 1 SE. So the 8 reps would, there'd be a pod and 1 SE would be responsible and you'd kind of have to fight to get Jason M. Lemkin or Lenny's time to help the 8 reps. This is inverted. The FDE's number 1 job is to make the customer a success. Okay. I was literally the other day doing a presentation, an AI leader that closed a $3 million deal. The FDE did it all himself. Sales wasn't even involved in the deal. They went on site, they got the deployment going, they tuned it, everything. All sales did was manage it through the procurement process. Okay. That's pretty different than a guy answering some questions for the humans, right? So it is a combination of customer success and SE or whatever, but it is, it is really, I mean, frankly, it's just being a, a classic consultant that gets the product done on day one, on, on day one. That's the difference is that when you go live, it works. When you go live, it works. That's what that, and it's a fancy name for a bunch of folks on your team that when it goes live, the AI agent actually works. So you have 100% success rate instead of like the 5% rate of 2024. So those people, but they do need to be tech, technical.
