Wipro says its AI Native unit now has 2,000+ engineers including FDEs; Persistent cites a certified FDE team in Q2 wins

Wipro CEO Srinivas Pallia told analysts on the company's Q2 FY27 earnings call on October 15 that the AI Native unit Wipro launched in April is "making rapid progress with over 2,000 engineers including FDEs — forward-deployed engineers." He tied the unit to growing success in outcome-based deals and gave three examples: a small-language-model deployment for a major US retail bank, an AI-powered digital plant for a large Middle East petrochemical company, and an enrollment and billing SLM deployment for a US healthcare payer. CFO Aparna Iyer said the AI Native unit is an area where Wipro will keep investing even as it works to lift margins. Wipro did not give a separate count for FDEs alone.

Persistent Systems, which also reported Q2 FY27 results on October 15, listed among its key wins the acceleration of mainframe and legacy modernization "through agentic AI ecosystems, frontier models and a dedicated team of certified Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs)" for a leading hyperscaler (Persistent press release).

Why it matters: following HCLTech's FDE Academy announcement earlier this week, two more large Indian IT services firms are now naming forward-deployed engineers in their quarterly results, and tying them to outcome-based and AI-native delivery rather than classic staffing. For engineers, it means FDE-titled roles are spreading from AI labs and startups into big services firms, often around specific industry deployments such as banking, healthcare and legacy modernization.