"FDE washing" reaches Japan: survey of 40 firms selling FDE services finds 13 of 33 don't say engineers build anything

Gomumari, a small Tokyo company that sells its own FDE-style AI implementation service, published a review on Nov 2 of how 40 Japanese companies describe the FDE services they sell. It explicitly builds on Gartner's September warning about "FDE washing", where ordinary consulting gets marketed as forward deployed engineering.

Of the 33 firms whose FDE service pages it could read, 8 call the people doing the work consultants or specialists rather than engineers, and 5 don't say the provider does any development in their main plans (they offer coaching, configuration of off-the-shelf tools, or rollout of their own product instead). Only 10 of the 40 say they are on site or embedded at least one day a week; 12 publish prices, with the cheapest monthly plans ranging from ¥200,000 to ¥600,000. Just 5 say anything about who owns the deliverables or how they are handed over, and 14 mention minimum terms or stage-gated contracts.

The study only counts what companies write on their websites, not how they actually work, and its author competes in the same market. Still, it is a concrete look at how loosely the FDE label is being used outside the AI labs. For engineers weighing an FDE offer, the same questions apply: do you write and ship production code, how much time do you spend with the customer, and who owns what you build after you leave.