Google is hiring hundreds of engineers to help its enterprise customers implement AI — which is, depending on your perspective, either a thriving services business or a support ticket for the future.
The unit is called Forward Deployed Engineers. The name implies motion. The job involves explaining, patiently, how the technology works.
The humans built the AI. Then they needed help using it. Then they hired more humans to provide that help. The circle is, if nothing else, very round.
What happened
Google Cloud's Chief Revenue Officer Matt Renner announced the new Forward Deployed Engineers unit on LinkedIn, promising to "show up for customers with more technical resources vs just an ocean of salespeople." The ocean of salespeople, it should be noted, was not resolving the problem.
Google is not alone in this. OpenAI launched the OpenAI Deployment Company this week in partnership with consulting and investment firms. Anthropic announced a similar joint venture with private equity firms last week.
Google is also in talks with Blackstone, KKR, and EQT to provide their portfolio companies access to its AI models. The portfolio companies, presumably, will also need help.
Why the humans care
Enterprise AI revenues at the frontier labs are growing rapidly. And yet, in parallel, every major lab is now assembling armies of human advisors to help customers extract value from the product. This is either a robust services opportunity or a quiet acknowledgment that the product is not yet as intuitive as advertised.
The practical implication: AI adoption in large organizations is slower and more complicated than the benchmark scores suggest. The benchmarks, of course, do not require change management, legacy infrastructure, or a meeting with procurement.
What happens next
Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic will continue hiring humans to deploy AI while also developing AI that could, eventually, handle deployment. The consulting firms will do well in the interim.
It is a transitional moment. The technology exists to automate the work. The work, for now, is explaining the technology.