openai.comarticleWhat FDE means at OpenAI
Colin Jarvis, Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at OpenAI, describes how the FDE team works with enterprise customers to close the "deployment gap". Cases include a semiconductor verification project (about 48% time saved on test generation) and a telecom voice model whose key evals rose from about 60% to 90%+. Moving use cases onto a Codex harness with skills and plugins removed about 90% of custom code.
TL;DR OpenAI's head of FDE explains how forward deployed engineers ship customer AI systems, rebuild them on Codex, and pass model gaps to Research.
Organisations named here
- OpenAI
- John Deere
- Thrive Holdings
- Crete
- Colin Jarvis
- Model Context Protocol
Technologies named here
- Codex
- OpenAI Presence
- OpenAI voice model
- Swarm
- Agents API
- OpenAI APIs
- MCP servers
- Skills and plugins
- Model Context Protocol
- OpenAI API
Techniques named here
- Forward deployed engineering
- Common harness on Codex
- Building evals with domain experts
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