Services-as-Software

Also: Services-as-Software

Services-as-software describes work that used to be sold as consulting hours being delivered as software instead. Rather than a team of consultants producing slides and recommendations, a company ships software, often AI-driven, that does the work, with engineers embedded to make it fit each customer.

It is a deliberate play on software-as-a-service. SaaS sold you a product to use yourself. Services-as-software sells you the outcome, with the FDE as the person who makes the outcome real inside your specific environment.

The model explains a lot of the FDE hiring surge. As AI agents take on more of the actual work, someone still has to deploy and adapt them per customer, and that someone is a forward deployed engineer.

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