12 CHANNELVISION | SUMMER 2026 There are a lot of reasons why the major foundation model companies have invested a lot of money into teams of forward deployed engineers (FDEs) to help enterprise customers scale their AI initiatives. Many of those same reasons are why technology advisors and MSPs should spend time on AI certification designed to help SMB customers move forward with their AI efforts. In the unlikely event that you missed the headlines, AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Google, AWS and Microsoft all recently announced go-to-market and/or partner initiatives that include millions of dollars going toward FDEs. Palantir, for its part, is credited with inventing the concept of embedding FDEs into the integrations of its government and enterprise customers. These AI-specialist engineers work closely with businesses and their technology leaders, as well as frontline staff, to integrate AI models into existing systems, reconsider critical workflows and solve security and governance issues, among other tasks. The ultimate idea is to help customers move from identifying AI opportunities to building systems that deliver measurable results. That’s the stage where enterprise customers reside in their AI maturity. They’re no longer experimenting with AI or questioning where and whether it matters. Conversations are shifting from adoption of AI to execution, governance and measurable outcomes. The need for FDEs stems from the realization that most enterprises simply lack the expertise to execute the shift and realize AI’s true, and company-specific, potential. The SMB customers that reside in the channel’s wheelhouse may not be as far along on their AI journeys as their enterprise counterparts, but they certainly have moved past the experimentation stage to actively looking for measurable results. They don’t need to be sold on AI. Similar to enterprises, they are shifting from user adoption to business-wide adoption. And at that stage of the journey, SMBs need help deciding on the most effective places to invest in AI and finding ways to measure its effectiveness. By Martin Vilaboy SMBs need AI advisors, and certified product training sets an advisory firm apart The Certainty of AI Certification AI & AUTOMATION
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