Airrived Co-Founder Anurag Gurtu: Enterprise AI Companies Disguise Service Costs as Software Valuations with Forward-Deployed Engineers
Anurag Gurtu, co-founder and CEO of Airrived, argues in a guest commentary that multiple enterprise AI companies are hiring large armies of forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) to hand-build workflows at customer sites that their products were supposed to automate, then booking the labor cost as software ARR to earn software valuation multiples. He poses a testable question: if you removed the embedded engineer, would the customer still get what they paid for? He cites OpenAI's pledge of up to $1.5 billion into DeployCo, FDE job postings growing 800% to 1,000% year over year, and Anthropic base salaries of $280,000 to $320,000 to illustrate the model's scale. Gurtu contends this is not operating leverage but 'people-market fit,' whose ceiling is that you can never hire humans cheaply or quickly enough to sustain a software multiple.
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An enterprise AI company just closed another nine-figure round to solve a problem software is supposed to solve by itself: getting humans to use the product. In a guest commentary published on Crunchbase News on October 19, 2026, Anurag Gurtu, co-founder and CEO of Airrived, calls this pattern 'Silicon Valley's most expensive game of pretend.'
His breakdown runs through seven steps: sell the customer an 'AI platform'; discover the platform doesn't actually do the thing on its own; send in forward-deployed engineers who spend six months hand-building the workflow the website implied already existed; bill the customer for 'software'; book it as ARR; raise a bigger round because 'ARR go up'; repeat forever, with an increasingly large and increasingly expensive engineering org standing between the product and the promise it made. Gurtu's judgment: this is not a flywheel. It's a payroll with a pitch deck.
The data supporting this assessment point to scale. Gurtu cites multiple sources: Lightcast data reported by Fortune put 'forward deployed engineer' job postings up more than 1,000% from January to August 2026; Financial Times data carried by PYMNTS showed listings up more than 800% from January to September 2025; Indeed data showed postings rising from 643 in April 2025 to 5,330 in April 2026. On compensation, Anthropic lists base pay of $280,000 to $320,000 for the role and OpenAI $185,000 to $300,000 base plus equity; Fortune reported some Anthropic roles reaching $400,000 in total compensation.