AI deployment engineers: demand jumped, supply is small

Juan Molina ·

The Sociable reports that 70% of companies now plan to hire forward-deployed engineers, and that Claude certification sits with partner firms, not independents.

Building an AI prototype has become easy. Running it safely inside a business has not. The Sociable, October 15, 2026 reports that at the start of 2026 only 5% to 10% of companies planned to bring on forward-deployed engineers, the specialists who work inside a client's business to get AI into production. By the end of June, that figure had jumped to 70%.

What the report says about Latin America

The same report says engineering firms with teams from Argentina to Costa Rica have been certifying their engineers on Anthropic's Claude in 2026 and joining Anthropic's partner program, which vets the firms it trusts to put Claude into production for enterprise customers. It names three of them:

  • Globan, founded in Argentina, reached the Preferred tier in June and said it is the largest Latin America-founded services firm to do so.
  • CI&T, in Brazil, said in June, as The Sociable reports, that it is certifying more than 1,000 engineers on Claude. The report does not say which tier it holds.
  • JTech, based in Monterrey, obtained Select status and pitches itself as a Mexican partner that implements Claude in Spanish.

The catch: the certification belongs to partner firms

The report notes that Claude certification is only open to people who work at partner firms. Independent engineers cannot earn it on their own. That matters for anyone who plans to find "Claude-certified" people one by one on LinkedIn or GitHub: the credential mostly sits inside firms, not with freelancers.

The bar for the firms is real. According to the program's published requirements as The Sociable summarizes them, entry-level Select status needs at least 10 certified practitioners, two customers running Claude in production in the past year and one public customer story. The report adds that people at 46,000 firms hold Claude certifications, but only 88 firms appear in Anthropic's public directory of vetted service partners.

A reason to stay careful

The Sociable also quotes Gartner, which expects about 70% of vendor-led forward-deployed projects to be abandoned by 2028 because of high cost and a lack of delivery depth. Its analyst said many providers use the forward-deployed label loosely. A certificate and a partner listing are evidence worth checking, not proof that a team can deliver on your project.

What to do this week

  • List the AI projects stuck between prototype and production, and write down what each one needs to run every day: testing, a security review and a named owner.
  • Check Anthropic's public partner directory for firms in your time zone before you look at individual profiles.
  • Ask each firm which engineers on your project hold the certification, and how many customers it has running Claude in production.
  • For independent engineers, who cannot hold this certification, ask for production work you can verify instead of a certificate.