There’s a new category forming inside every serious AI company: FDE enablement.
Palantir invented the Forward Deployed Engineer over a decade ago — send your best builders into the client’s building, write code in the room, let the deal move at the speed of the demo. For years that was a Palantir-only curiosity. Fast forward, and OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Scale AI, Sierra, and Glean are all racing to build their own version of it, because you can’t sell trust in an agent with a slide deck. You have to build the thing live, in front of the person whose job is on the line if it doesn’t work.
That shift is collapsing the old org chart. AEs need to be technical enough to run real discovery. SEs need to build working POCs, not scripted demos. FDEs need to compress what used to be a multi-week pilot into days — because the second-fastest POC loses the deal, especially with how fast AI is moving.
Every company doing this well has figured out how to hire for it. Almost none have figured out how to train for it. That’s FDE enablement, and right now it barely exists.
The technical ramp is solved. The human ramp is tribal.
Every FDE org has systematized the technical onboarding: docs, sandboxes, API checklists. But ask the same team how they train someone to run a discovery call that surfaces the real blocker, negotiate scope with a skeptical technical buyer, or translate a modeling constraint into language a VP will trust, and you get a shrug and a story about their best FDE. That’s tribal knowledge sitting in three people’s heads, right when headcount plans call for ten times more of them.
That’s the gap Yoodli FDE University closes — and we do it end to end, from the technical build to how you’re actually measured on it.
What Yoodli FDE University does
1. Trains you on the AI tools themselves. How to run a demo that survives contact with real customer data. How to actually build an agent in the room — not a canned walkthrough, but the live, improvisational build that proves the product works on the customer’s own problem. As an admin, you can upload a demo of what a good agent build looks like, and Yoodli turns it into a training scenario and scores your reps against it.
2. Teaches you to speak the value. Knowing how to build isn’t the same as knowing how to explain why it matters to the person across the table. FDE University trains that translation layer — turning a technical build into a business case a non-technical stakeholder will trust and champion internally.
3. Ties it to enterprise transformation strategy. A single POC isn’t a strategy. Yoodli trains FDEs, SEs, and AEs to carry the bigger conversation — how this pilot fits into the customer’s broader AI transformation, what the next twelve months look like, and how to be the trusted advisor for that roadmap, not just the person who shipped the demo.
And every one of these skills gets measured the same way, end to end: a quantifiable, rubric-based scorecard covering time-to-value framing, technical credibility, objection structure, and clarity under pressure. Not vibes. A scorecard a VP of FDE can actually manage a team against — from the first practice rep to the live customer room.
How Yoodli FDE University works
Orgs use Yoodli as one end-to-end system, not a bundle of point solutions:
- Train. Upload your own demos, playbooks, and best-FDE examples, and Yoodli turns them into realistic roleplay scenarios — discovery calls, scope negotiations, live escalations — so every rep practices against your actual bar, not a generic template.
- Measure. Every rep gets scored against the same rubric, so you can see who’s ready for a Fortune 500 pilot and who needs three more reps, instead of guessing based on who feels confident.
- Ramp in days, not months. Because the training and the scoring live in one loop, new FDEs, SEs, and AEs close the gap between “technically onboarded” and “trusted in the room” in days instead of the months it takes when that gap is closed by osmosis.
- Scale the transformation, not just the hire. Once the rubric exists, it doesn’t just ramp individuals — it becomes the org’s shared standard for what a great FDE conversation looks like, which is what actually lets you scale a forward-deployed motion company-wide instead of it living in three people’s heads.
Why now
FDE orgs are about to go through the same maturation curve that SE and CS orgs went through a decade ago — from “shadow our best person for six months” to a repeatable ramp with a rubric. The company that builds the enablement infrastructure for that shift first doesn’t just sell into the category. It defines it.
That’s the bet behind FDE University: FDE enablement isn’t a nice-to-have training add-on. It’s the missing layer of the enterprise AI GTM stack, and Yoodli is building it first.
— Varun Puri, Yoodli