"Forward Deployed Engineer" is on every job board, and the question of whether to hire them has reached the most senior levels of large organizations. Ask three companies what the role is and you will get three answers. For an executive, the definition matters less than a plainer question. What are you actually buying?
When Deciding Gets Cheap argued that cheap AI decisions spread into the situations where their confidence means least. Nobody disagrees with that. Every engineer I have said it to nods, means it, and goes back to a system that trusts model output anyway. The gap is not conviction. It is arithmetic.
Two Kinds of Hard argued that agents collapsed the cost of producing output while the cost of judgment did not move at all. A new class of model now goes after judgment directly. It does not write anything. It picks one answer from a list you define, says how sure it is, and does that in thirty milliseconds.