Five months after OpenAI set up a company to put its own forward deployed engineers (FDEs) inside client businesses, India’s IT majors have answered with FDE plans running into the thousands. New survey data suggests their engineers are the closest to the role, but not yet ready for it.
When OpenAI launched the OpenAI Deployment Company on 11 May, it entered a business Indian IT knows well: sending engineers into client organisations to make technology work. The new company, majority-owned and controlled by OpenAI, started with more than $4 billion from 19 investment firms, consultancies and system integrators. OpenAI also agreed to buy the AI consultancy Tomoro, bringing in about 150 experienced forward deployed engineers (FDEs) and deployment specialists from day one.
Investors read it as a direct challenge. On 12 May the BSE IT index fell 3%, with TCS and Infosys dropping in early trade to levels last seen in 2020. Two days later, the Nifty IT index stood nearly 39% below its December 2024 peak.
Infographic · Money committed to FDE roles, 2026
Infographic: OpenAI has put $4 billion behind deploying its own engineers inside client firms, TCS spends about $1 billion a year on talent and AI skilling, and Anthropic has committed $100 million to training FDEs.
What OpenAI’s forward deployed engineers will do
According to OpenAI, its FDEs are embedded in client organisations. They work with business leaders and frontline teams to find high-value uses of AI, redesign workflows around them, and build production systems that connect OpenAI’s models to the customer’s data, tools and controls.
None of the partners OpenAI named is an Indian IT firm. TPG leads the group, with Advent, Bain Capital and Brookfield as co-leads, and Bain & Company, Capgemini and McKinsey among the consulting partners. That leaves Indian IT as both partner and rival: TCS and Infosys are among the seven launch partners of OpenAI’s Codex Labs, announced in April, while the Deployment Company competes for the same deployment work. The stakes are high in India itself, which Sam Altman said in February has 100 million weekly ChatGPT users.
OpenAI is not alone. On 2 October, Anthropic committed $100 million to its Claude Frontier Academy, which aims to train 10,000 Frontier Deployed Engineers by the end of 2027. Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte and McKinsey are among the firms in its first cohorts; again, no Indian IT firm is named.
That job description, from client discovery to a working production system, is now shaping how engineers are trained for the role. Scaler’s 12-month forward deployed engineer course is built around a full enterprise AI deployment: scoping a client problem, integrating LLMs with the customer’s data and legacy systems, securing and deploying the solution to production, and presenting outcomes to stakeholders. Mentors on the programme bring more than a decade of FDE and industry experience.
Why the FDE model challenges Indian IT
Much of Indian IT’s growth came from large teams on long contracts, often billed by effort. The FDE model works the other way: small teams embedded with the client, judged on whether a system reaches production and delivers results. As MIT Sloan Management Review India reported in August, citing the services research body TSIA, FDE work pushes pricing from hours logged towards business outcomes. It comes at a time when HCLTech puts AI-related price deflation at 2% to 3%.
TCS, Infosys and HCLTech answer with FDE hiring plans
Since May, the largest firms have committed to FDEs in numbers far larger than OpenAI’s starting team. TCS said in July that “as many as 1% to 1.5% of our associates” could move into FDE roles, about 5,900 to 8,900 people on its June headcount. Infosys plans 6,000 FDEs over the next few years. HCLTech said in October that about 15% of its second-quarter freshers are elite engineers who will be upskilled into FDEs through an FDE academy, and LTM’s AI 1000 programme covers more than 1,000 engineers.
TCS chief executive K Krithivasan has pointed to where Indian IT believes its edge lies. “What you need is a deep knowledge of the customer environment to make it work,” he said in July. Decades of running client systems give the IT majors that knowledge. The test is whether they can turn it into deployment engineers quickly enough.
Are India’s engineers ready for FDE roles?
New data suggests the raw material is there. The FDE Opportunity Report, commissioned by Scaler and conducted independently by CyberMedia Research (CMR) through face-to-face interviews with 1,000 engineers and 200 enterprise technology decision-makers in September, found that 35% of engineers at Indian IT services providers already do work that is highly FDE-like. That is the highest share of any employer type in the survey, ahead of MNCs (34%), global capability centres (29%) and startups (28%).
Demand is forming ahead of job titles. 56% of the enterprises surveyed already have FDE-like work done under other titles, while only 5% have dedicated FDE roles. Among the IT services providers surveyed, 60% have defined plans to hire FDE or FDE-like talent within 12 months, and the segment showed the most current hiring activity.
The gaps are in the skills that define the job. 77% of enterprises rated production deployment as important, but only 19% rated its availability in the market as strong. For customer engagement the figures were 61% and 25%. Engineers named limited customer-facing experience (37%) as the biggest barrier to moving into the role.
Where India’s forward deployed engineers will come from
Closing that gap at the scale the IT majors have promised will need training both inside company academies and outside them. Scaler, which has committed ₹25 crore to train 10,000 FDEs, with its programme focused on the two skills the survey found scarcest: production deployment and customer engagement.
“Every enterprise has its own systems, data and ways of working, which makes deploying AI far more complex than simply building it,” said Amar Srivastava, CEO-Online and Group CPO at Scaler, when the commitment was announced in July.
That complexity is what OpenAI is betting $4 billion on, and what Indian IT says it already understands. Which side wins more of the deployment work may depend less on capital than on who can produce engineers ready for it.
