Writing on X, Levie said forward deployed engineers are about to become one of the most in-demand jobs in tech. The role belongs to specialists who bridge AI model capability and enterprise implementation. Box built the role because customers couldn’t get AI working on their own. It turns out most enterprises can’t. Monthly job listings for forward deployed engineers increased more than 800% between January and September 2025, PYMNTS reported.
That gap between a working AI product and a working AI deployment is where a new labor market is forming. It doesn’t show up in job displacement numbers. It shows up in org charts.
The Layer Nobody Had
The Times reported that Box’s new roles span engineering, IT and go-to-market functions, including AI architects, AI solutions managers, model evaluators and AI business automation engineers. Levie said Box’s position as both a seller and user of AI is driving the expansion.
“We ourselves are selling AI to our customers, so that’s actually causing us to need to hire more people,” he said. Internally, AI productivity gains are creating new bottlenecks that also require headcount to resolve.
Model evaluators illustrate how new the work is. That function didn’t exist as a job category before enterprises started deploying AI at scale. It exists now because the models themselves aren’t interchangeable and the decision which to use carries real operational weight.
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The Forward Deployed Engineer Moment
Box isn’t alone in building this layer. The Information reported that Google is hiring hundreds of forward deployed engineers to help customers move its AI products from pilot into production. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that the demand from customers and partners for engineers who can drive agent development is growing rapidly. OpenAI and Anthropic have launched billion-dollar deployment ventures pursuing the same function, according to PYMNTS.
Fast Company reported that Levie described FDEs as a massive role in tech now, one that reflects the kind of highly technical work AI is creating rather than eliminating.
Labor Market Rotating to Deployment
The World Economic Forum reported that LinkedIn data shows AI has already added more than 1.3 million new roles globally, including AI engineers, forward deployed engineers and data annotators, alongside over 600,000 AI-enabled data center jobs. AI engineer ranks as the fastest-growing job title in the U.S. for the second year running, per the same data.
IBM is reconfiguring its entry-level workforce rather than reducing it. The New York Times reported that IBM’s chief human resources officer overhauled early-career job descriptions to strip out tasks AI can handle and refocus junior engineers on client engagement and complex problem-solving. The company tripled its entry-level hiring in 2026.
The pattern emerging across Box, Google, IBM and others isn’t primarily displacement. It’s a new organizational layer sitting between foundation models and business operations, staffed by roles that require both technical depth and the judgment to make AI useful inside a specific enterprise context. That layer didn’t exist three years ago. It’s now one of the fastest-growing parts of the labor market.
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