I want to like the “AI is deflationary” story. It’s clean, it’s optimistic, and every model launch this year has come with a chart showing cost per token falling off a cliff. I’ve written versions of that chart myself. The chart is real. It’s just not the whole curve. Qualcomm telling customers it’s raising prices by double digits, after exhausting its ability to absorb supplier costs, landed in the same news cycle as Anthropic pricing Opus 5 at roughly half of what Fable 5 costs for comparable capability.

A forward deployed engineer is an employee embedded directly inside another company to accelerate a technical transformation. That is the polite definition. The honest one is that the FDE exists because software that demos perfectly still fails to run inside a customer’s actual environment, and someone has to be physically present to close the distance between the two. The role is the price the industry pays for that gap. It is now the fastest-growing job family in AI, and the speed of its spread is a confession dressed as a hiring trend.