The FDE Bubble: Silicon Valley’s Most Expensive Game Of Pretend

Enterprise AI companies relying on armies of forward deployed engineers are disguising labor-intensive services as scalable software, inflating recurring revenue and valuations while falling short of autonomy claims, argues Anurag Gurtu, co-founder and CEO of Airrived. In this guest commentary he urges buyers and investors to examine deployment costs and gross margins to distinguish sustainable software businesses from expensive staffing operations.