Dentsu Group starts a 3,000-person FDE and FDM skills program on Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise

On 14 October 2026, Dentsu Digital and three other Japan Dentsu Group companies — Dentsu, Dentsu Soken, and Ignition Point — announced a group-wide skills program for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) and Forward Deployed Marketers (FDM), aimed at roughly 3,000 people. The curriculum centers on Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise, from practical use of the platform through embedding AI into real client workflows.

The companies frame FDEs as practitioners who sit with clients and drive AI change end to end: strategy and marketing design, insight work, creative generation and measurement, and day-to-day operations. That is a large consulting-and-agency bench adopting the FDE title and embedding model, not a single AI lab hiring a few dozen field engineers.

For people watching the FDE market, it matters because demand is spreading into advertising and professional services in Japan, with Google Cloud as the stack. Scale (thousands of trainees) and the explicit FDE/FDM pairing also show how agencies are trying to productize customer-side AI deployment alongside traditional marketing work.