Emerging New work created by AI deployment. Evidence is younger and thinner.
Forward deployed engineer
Postings up 729% in a year: the job that exists because AI projects fail for organisational reasons.
- Horizon
- Apr 2025 → Apr 2026
- Pay
- ≈$174,000 median base
- Protection from automation
- Partly protected · our reading
The blurb for this one is the most useful sentence in the new-jobs literature: these projects fail for organisational reasons rather than technical ones, so the job is an engineer embedded inside the customer’s building, clearing blockers that a support ticket cannot reach.Exponent 2026
It is also where the “AI makes work more human” claim stops being a slogan. The role is mostly software engineering and almost entirely relationship management, and postings for it grew 729% in a single year.Exponent 2026 Treat the exact number as a job-board count of one title — real, but not an occupational statistic.
What holds it up
- Enterprise AI deployments fail on process and data politics, not model quality
- The role sits inside the customer, so the human relationship is the product
What threatens it
- Vendor-published and job-board counts are not official occupational statistics
- Highly concentrated in a handful of AI labs and consultancies