Palantir invented the forward-deployed engineer model more than a decade ago. The firm's engineers became known for living inside government agencies and Fortune 500 companies for months at a time, not to train employees on software, but to build systems alongside them from the inside.

Amazon has become the latest company to form a dedicated team of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) to help clients with new AI tools. The tech giant has invested $1 billion to set up this new internal FDE team within AWS, weeks after OpenAI and Anthropic started focusing on this role.