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AI may be everywhere, but according to a report from executive search firm Christian & Timbers, the people needed to make it really pay off are in short supply.
The study reports that out of 180 companies examined, fewer than one percent leveraged AI deployment to protect or generate more than $100M. That trend is backed up by a Boston Consulting Group October 2024 study that said only four percent of companies consistently generated significant returns from their AI use.
Christian & Timbers surveyed more than 250 C-suite leaders, and they said that the biggest bottleneck getting in the way of making AI transformation more productive has little to do with machinery—it has to do with a lack of “forward-deployed engineers,” the elite group of tech pros who can turn AI’s potential into tangible benefits.
FDEs work within an enterprise—identifying high-value workflows, architecting AI systems, deploying them into live operating environments and taking accountability for measuring business outcomes.
“Elite FDEs have actually carried enterprise AI from promise to production multiple times,” the report says. “They can sit with an operations team, learn the process [and] build the agenytic workflow.”
The presence of FDEs at a company appears to have a strong effect on whether or not its implementation of AI moves the needle on its ROI numbers.
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But the study says that there are fewer than 2,000 top-level FDEs in the U.S.—and 80 percent of them are in the employ of industry behemoth Palantir.
Compounding that problem: Demand for FDEs is accelerating. While just five to 10 percent of the surveyed companies said that they were planning to hire FDEs at the beginning of 2026, that number had climbed to approximately 70 percent by the end of Q2.
Overall, the demand for these top-level tech pros could rise by as much as 2,000 percent within just the next, putting a damper on AI’s benefits for companies across the board—from communications to medicine to manufacturing.
According to Christian & Timbers, “attracting, retaining, and compensating those engineers is the single most important question C-suite leaders face."
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