Move over offshore coders. Indian IT firms are now sending engineers straight into the client’s war room. As artificial intelligence (AI) projects move from flashy demos to messy real-world deployment, companies such as Infosys, HCLTech, Wipro and Coforge are embracing a Silicon Valley-style role called the forward deployed engineer (FDE) who is a part coder, part consultant, part corporate therapist.
The model, popularised by Palantir Technologies and now aggressively expanded by OpenAI, places engineers directly inside client organisations to rapidly build and fix AI systems where the real chaos lives: operations, workflows and reluctant employees.
In simple terms, enterprises have realised that buying AI is easy. Making it work inside a large bank, hospital or manufacturing company without breaking everything else is the hard part. “Deploying AI is the easy part, but operationalising it inside complex enterprises is where most companies struggle,” said Anshuman Singh, chief executive for UK and Europe at Hinduja Global Solutions.
Shifting economics of India’s $280-billion IT services industry
That shift is beginning to change the economics — and culture — of India’s $280-billion IT services industry, which for decades thrived on a different formula: large offshore teams, multi-year execution contracts and predictable billing models.
Now clients increasingly want engineers sitting beside business teams, redesigning workflows and building AI tools within weeks rather than executing software projects over several quarters.
Indian IT firms, however, are now trying to adapt rather than resist. Infosys CEO Salil Parekh recently said the company was building a rapidly expanding FDE team to work directly with clients on AI deployments.
His counterpart in HCLTech, C Vijayakumar, has referred to “OpenAI-badged agentic engineering teams” collaborating with OpenAI’s forward deployed engineers on enterprise projects. Coforge CEO Sudhir Singh has said the company plans to scale its FDE workforce to 100 by the end of the year, while both Wipro and HCLTech have opened hiring for such roles in the US.
What do Industry execs say?
Industry executives say FDEs differ sharply from traditional software developers or consultants because they combine engineering skills with business understanding and client-facing execution. “FDEs are gold dust in enterprise AI,” said Ashwin Venkatesan, executive research leader at HfS Research, noting that such talent is difficult to scale because it requires both technical depth and operational expertise.
The urgency has intensified after OpenAI last week launched its own consulting and deployment business following the acquisition of Scotland-based AI consulting firm Tomoro, bringing in around 150 forward deployed engineers and deployment specialists. The move rattled Indian IT stocks amid fears that AI-native firms may increasingly compete directly with traditional outsourcing companies.
Analysts caution that the transition may not be seamless. “A similar question came up during the digital transformation wave when Indian IT firms tried to enter consulting more aggressively,” said Pareekh Jain, chief executive at EIIRTrend. “But consulting did not align with the industry’s traditional business model of large multi-year execution deals and high margins.”
Still, the direction appears increasingly unavoidable. According to Siddhartha Tipnis, partner and technology sector leader at Deloitte India, demand for FDE-led delivery models is currently strongest in North America, particularly in regulated sectors such as banking, healthcare and life sciences where enterprises need engineers deeply embedded within business operations.
The era of coding quietly from offshore campuses may not disappear anytime soon. But in the AI economy, Indian IT companies are discovering that clients no longer just want software delivered. They want engineers who can sit in the room, fix problems in real time and explain to the CEO why the chatbot just hallucinated a quarterly report.