Senior Salesforce figures have revealed plans to expand forward deployed engineering (FDE) capabilities in the UK as the CRM giant targets agentic AI adoption gains.
Speaking to assembled media at Dreamforce 2026, Paul O’ Sullivan, SVP of Solutions Engineering at Salesforce UK, said the company plans to double the number of FDEs operating across the UK.
“We’re going to double the size of the [FDE unit] capacity,” he said. “It strengthens our position in the UK and it shows the bigger investment that we’re making as well.”
O’Sullivan told ITPro this will take the total number of FDEs across the UK to “about 95”. These specialist engineers will be embedded with Salesforce customers, helping staff to use the company’s agentic AI tools and to build custom agents.
The company's career portal shows it's currently hiring for FDEs spanning core products, including Agentforce and Data 360.
FDEs act as consultants embedded directly within enterprises, offering technical guidance and working alongside internal teams to build custom AI solutions.
“The primary purpose is two-fold,” he said in response to a follow-up question from Diginomica. “We’re going to help you build your agents that are going to link directly to business value.”
“That’s going to allow you to then think about where you can drive better customer experience, more loyalty, improvement on service. That plays into exactly how agents can deliver value more widely.”
Salesforce eyes easy agent gains
The move builds on a broader push by Salesforce across the UK and Ireland, with the company accelerating skills-related investment and engagement with enterprise customers.
Notably, Salesforce already has a professional services organization designed to support adoption of its various services. While FDEs sit separate from this, Salesforce UKI CEO Zahra Bahrololoumi said they form part of a larger effort to “skill up and enable customers”.
“The more fluent our customer base is, the more they’ll get out of the platform,” she told assembled media.
“Our FDE capacity and our FDE capability has been sized at the moment to ensure that, based on what we see on where our customers are, we can get them up and running with agents and consuming and learning and tuning.”
O’Sullivan added that the FDE team is also connected to the wider engineering function at Salesforce, offering broader engineering expertise for customers.
“When we think about 95 as a growth number, we’re actually connected to an existing team that’s 330,” he said. “So the combined function will unlock more scale and more opportunity.”
FDEs in the spotlight
Salesforce isn’t alone in its FDE focus. As ITPro reported in July, a host of hyperscalers and leading AI providers have expanded capabilities on this front over the last year, with the primary aim of streamlining AI deployments.
In late June, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced plans to invest $1 billion in its Forward Deployed Engineering division.
Just days later, Microsoft unveiled the Microsoft Frontier Company as part of a $2.5 billion investment, with the long-term aim of hiring and deploying up to 6,000 AI experts and engineers inside customer organizations.
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