Descriptions:
Pauline Brunet, who leads Cursor’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team globally, brings ten years of enterprise AI deployment experience to this AI Engineer conference talk. She opens by defining where FDE creates the most value using a 2×2 matrix that maps customer digital maturity against product configurability — arguing that the FDE motion is most impactful with customers who are mid-maturity and working with highly customizable products, and least useful for either pure self-service SaaS or fully mature teams who can drive adoption independently.
Brunet is direct about the boundaries between FDE and staff augmentation, describing her personal red flag: when an enterprise asks for help because they’re understaffed rather than because they want to co-build. Cursor’s FDE mission, as she presents it, is to co-design and co-build AI software factories with customers, deploy long-running agents and automations that deliver measurable ROI after the engagement ends, and surface edge cases — including non-software use cases in HR, finance, and supply chain — back to Cursor’s product and engineering teams.
The talk offers practical guidance for any AI-native company evaluating whether to build an FDE function, including how to structure the team, how to qualify engagements, and how to avoid the trap of becoming a glorified consulting shop. Brunet’s framing of FDE as “the tip of the spear” for testing Cursor’s platform beyond the software development lifecycle gives the session strategic depth beyond operational advice.
📺 Source: AI Engineer · Published July 14, 2026
🏷️ Format: Keynote Launch
