The AI Job Nobody Explains, and Why We're Teaching It

I've made twenty-four videos about one job title. Thirty to forty seconds each, one a day. Most people still haven't heard of it.

MIT put out a number that started this for me: ninety-five percent of AI pilots fail. That number isn't about the models. Every company can buy the same models now. They fail because nobody in the building knows how to make one work inside a real business.

That gap has a job title. Forward Deployed Engineer. You sit down next to the person actually doing the work, find the real bottleneck behind whatever they told you the problem was, and build something that runs on Monday.

Palantir invented the role. OpenAI posted one at two hundred eighty thousand base, no CS degree required. Anthropic, Microsoft and Databricks are all hiring for it.

Then look at who's getting in. Most listings want three to seven years of experience. Anthropic said they would train tens of thousands of AI engineers. I went looking for how many actually got trained and found eighty-six.

I know that gap from the inside. Self-taught designer out of Bed-Stuy. I got to Netflix because I stayed at an event in San Francisco I almost left early, and somebody I met there knew my old manager. That is not a plan you can hand to anybody. Once I was in, we started Pathways, because getting in the room yourself isn't the same as building a door.

Here is why I think this one can be taught. The hardest skill in the job isn't writing code. It's judgment: which step of a workflow should be ordinary software, which one actually needs a model, and which one stays with a person. Right behind judgment is evals, proving the thing works against real cases that already happened, and that part takes almost no code at all.

Both of those favor somebody who has worked a real job in a real industry. Eight years in claims processing teaches you things about claims processing I will never know, and in this job that counts for more than a certificate. That describes a lot of the people we serve at Beyond Code Collective.

The jobs are there. The on-ramp isn't. That's what we're building.

— Fonz Morris