Following the playbook Palantir pioneered, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Amazon are investing billions of dollars to hire so-called forward deployed engineers to get newfangled AI to work in enterprises.

Then there’s Google, which says AI can automate some of what these FDEs do.

While Google Cloud recently said it plans to hire hundreds of FDEs to help customers figure out what kind of apps they want to develop with its Gemini AI tools, the company is now automating some of the work these specialized consultants do for large companies to organize their data, said Andi Gutmans, a Google Cloud vice president and general manager who oversees its database products.

Until recently, FDEs worked on-site with customers to organize proprietary corporate data to ensure AI could make better sense of it and thus help employees analyze it faster and more accurately. For instance, businesses often define financial metrics such as gross revenue differently, and the FDE’s manual work aimed to ensure the AI would understand such differences.

Gutmans said that Google has realized the limits of this labor-intensive approach. “If you want to move to activating 100% of your enterprise data, you're not going to be able to hire enough people to make that happen,” he said.

In his view, customers can get the most value from AI agents by giving them access to as much data as possible, including their files and legal contracts. Google’s AI-powered FDEs scour through customers’ data to understand how it relates to various parts of their business operations, like sales and inventory management.