Jacob Vaidyan

Great post on FDEs. Everyone should read it if you’re interested in this job category. This is a job that is going to be around as long as AI keeps changing rapidly, which it inevitably will. People often wonder why isn’t this like just deploying other forms of technology in the past, like cloud. Because something like cloud adoption affected a fairly concentrated set of users (developers and IT), and generally didn’t require a fundamental change to the workflows of employees to get the benefits of the new service being delivered on the cloud. At best you went to one training session and you were done. With agents, the work to implement them is not only highly technical, but they directly impact the underlying workflows that people participate in. This means there’s a ton of technical work and change management that comes with it. Further, the pace of change of cloud wasn’t nearly as quick, so there was a lot more time for best practices to propagate. Now, every model change means either something new can be done that wasn’t possible before, or some piece of scaffolding is now redundant or holding you back. This is why it’s commonly easier for a vendor or partner that’s seen the implementation hundreds or thousands of times help do the work, even with internal support from the customer. So, this job isn’t going away any time soon, and will be a great path for a lot of technical talent, especially early career.