monday.com bets on forward deployed engineers with monday Frontier, plans to hire into 2027

monday.com used its third-quarter 2026 earnings call on November 9 to put forward deployed engineering at the center of its strategy. Co-CEOs Roy Mann and Eran Zinman described monday Frontier, launched at the company's Elevate conference, as a service organization in which deployed engineers work directly with enterprise customers to find where AI can change core business processes, then build, implement and keep monitoring those solutions. Frontier also bundles professional services, webinars and one-on-one enablement.

The context is a company in transition: revenue grew 19% to about $378M, but management cited longer enterprise sales cycles as customers weigh how AI fits their business, plus SMB weakness after a July restructuring that cut headcount by about 20%. Zinman said customers keep telling monday they "need help" and cannot implement AI on their own, which is why the company is pairing its product with hands-on implementation.

For FDEs, the notable part is the hiring signal. Management said it plans to scale Frontier, with much of the growth coming from deployed engineers who embed in customer companies, and CFO Eliran Glazer said part of the roughly $100M in restructuring savings will be reinvested in hiring for the services function into 2027. Zinman added that customers' AI consumption rises after deployed engineers are placed with them, and framed Frontier as a driver of adoption and usage rather than a stand-alone services business, even if it pressures margins.

It is another example of a mainstream SaaS vendor, not only AI labs, building FDE capacity to turn AI features into paid usage among large accounts.