Indian enterprises want engineers who can take artificial intelligence (AI) out of the lab and make it work inside the businesses of their clients, but very few such engineers exist, suggests a report.
According to “India’s FDE Opportunity Report” by Scaler and CyberMedia Research (CMR), 80% of enterprises say AI and generative AI skills are important for forward deployed engineers (FDEs), but only 7% say they can find such talent in the market.
FDEs work directly with a client to understand its business problem, build, integrate and deploy a technology solution until it runs reliably in production.
Further, it adds 88% of enterprises expect their need for FDE capabilities to grow by 2030, and 60% plan to hire FDE or FDE-like talent within the next 12 months – a figure that rises to 77% among multinational companies. However, only 1% of the engineers surveyed currently work in explicit FDE roles.
Deployment is the new test
The skills enterprises find hardest to hire for are not the ones engineers are usually trained in.
The report states 77% of enterprises consider production deployment important, but only 19% say candidates with such skills are available. Customer engagement shows a similar gap, rated important by 61% of enterprises but available among only 25% of candidates.
Coding is the exception, with 78% of enterprises saying software engineering talent is readily available.
Consequently, companies are changing how they test candidates. The report finds that 51% of enterprises would rather give FDE candidates a real deployment or troubleshooting problem to solve, while only 24% would prioritise a coding test.
“What will matter most is the ability to take an AI solution from a proof of concept to a reliable production implementation while working closely with the customer,” an enterprise technology decision-maker at a global capability centre (GCC) said in the report.
Engineers are aware of where they fall short. When asked what stops them from moving into FDE roles, 37% said they lack experience of working with customers, and 32% said their AI and machine learning skills were not strong enough. Only one in ten engineers is familiar with a structured way to prepare for the role, so most are picking up these skills on the job or on their own.
The work, however, is not entirely new to Indian companies. According to the report, 56% of enterprises already have engineers doing FDE-like work under other job titles; instead of hiring from outside, 47% plan to build this capability by upskilling their existing software engineers.
Demand vs supply gap
The scarcity of these skills is beginning to show up in pay expectations.
The report notes that both engineers and employers most commonly expect FDE roles to pay 21% to 30% more than conventional engineering roles. Among engineers already working as FDEs, 80% report annual incomes between Rs 40 lakh and Rs 1 crore, although the report cautions that this finding comes from a small sample.
“We would consider paying more for someone who can handle the technical work and also work with customers to get solutions running in production. That combination is harder to find than coding skills alone,” an enterprise hiring decision-maker at a global AI service provider said in the report.
While there is plenty of interest from engineers – 58% of those surveyed want to move into FDE roles – the timing does not line up neatly. Interest peaks among engineers with six to eight years of experience, while employers mostly prefer candidates with three to five years.
Freshers face the toughest odds, with only 8% of enterprises open to hiring engineers with less than three years of experience.