The demand for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) in B2B SaaS companies has surged, with job postings increasing 12-fold in one year, according to ICONIQ’s 2025 GTM survey of 205 B2B SaaS executives, reported by saastr.com. This rise reflects a structural shift in AI company operations, highlighting a growing gap that many firms attempt to fill by repurposing Customer Success Managers (CSMs), often without success.
The core issue lies in the distinct roles and skill sets of FDEs versus CSMs. While CSMs focus on managing relationships, mitigating renewal risks, and driving expansion across multiple accounts, FDEs embed deeply with fewer customers, handling technical tasks such as writing and debugging workflows and resolving deployment blockers. FDEs’ work is proactive and technical, requiring skills closer to solutions engineers or junior product managers, whereas CSMs are trained for reactive, relationship-driven tasks optimized for retention.
This gap matters as AI companies increasingly rely on AI agents that automate work, necessitating specialized deployment expertise that CSMs generally lack. The inability to convert CSMs into FDEs quickly enough forces companies to reconsider their hiring and training strategies. The shift underscores a broader industry trend where technical deployment roles are becoming critical to AI product success, influencing how SaaS firms structure their customer-facing teams.
Looking ahead, companies will need to invest in recruiting dedicated FDE talent or develop new training programs tailored to the technical demands of AI deployment. The challenge will be balancing speed and quality in hiring to meet the growing operational needs of AI-driven SaaS products, as the traditional customer success model proves insufficient for this evolving landscape, saastr.com noted.