You know the one. Won't name it. Don't have to. You've read the press release ' 'autonomous,' 'agentic,' 'category-defining' in paragraph one, and then, a few paragraphs down, where the money is actually going: hiring an army of engineers to sit inside customer offices and manually make the 'autonomous' thing behave. OpenAI pledged up to $1.5 billion into a deployment joint venture valued at $10 billion, with another $4 billion from TPG, Bain Capital, Advent, Brookfield and Goanna. The vehicle, DeployCo, has been reported with more than $4 billion in investment. Meanwhile, job postings for 'forward deployed engineer' are up somewhere between 800% and 1,000% year over year. Lightcast data reported by Fortune put the increase at more than 1,000% from January to August 2026. Financial Times data carried by PYMNTS put listings up more than 800% from January to September 2025, and Indeed data showed postings rising from 643 in April 2025 to 5,330 in April 2026. Total comp is pushing past...
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