The term "FDE" has gone viral, and the leading US-listed AI application player has posted explosive growth in both business performance and stock price.

Leading US-listed AI application player Palantir has risen by more than 28% cumulatively this week, with its total market capitalization standing at 380 billion US dollars.

Recently, Palantir, the leading US-listed AI application player, has once again drawn market attention: since the start of this week, its cumulative increase has exceeded 28%, pushing its total market capitalization to 380 billion US dollars, just one step away from breaking its previous all-time high.

Palantir executive Danny Lutkus attributed this to the company's unique operation model: "Palantir's approach is completely different (from that of ordinary software companies), and standard solutions are not applicable to many enterprises."

Specifically, Palantir's main business is system construction, helping enterprises integrate artificial intelligence into their existing systems and data. Different from the mainstream practice of the Silicon Valley software industry, Palantir not only delivers software to customers, but also dispatches "coders" to work in customers' offices for a long time, ranging from several months to several years.

This model is the so-called FDE.

FDE is the abbreviation of Forward-Deployed Engineer. Traditional outsourcing is mainly responsible for codes and contracted workload, while FDE needs to drive changes in customers' business indicators, and precipitate project experience into reusable methods and product capabilities for subsequent use. Its complete workflow includes going to the customer site, identifying real demands, completing solution verification, promoting system launch, and gradually transforming one-time delivery into replicable methods and product capabilities.

A few days ago, Palantir released its second-quarter financial report: total revenue reached 1.94 billion US dollars, higher than the market expectation of 1.8 billion US dollars, with a year-on-year increase of 94%. The company also raised its full-year forecast at the same time, expecting full-year sales to reach as high as 8.16 billion US dollars, higher than the average market expectation of 7.7 billion US dollars. The adjusted operating profit is between 4.89 billion and 4.91 billion US dollars, higher than the upper limit of the previous forecast range of 4.45 billion US dollars.

Alex Karp, the company's chief executive officer, described this quarter as "unimaginable" and said that the sovereign AI wave makes him "extremely optimistic about the future". The so-called sovereign AI means that major enterprises do not want to hand over their own data to cutting-edge AI laboratories such as OpenAI and Google, and strive to realize independent and controllable data privacy.

Citi analysts pointed out in a research report that Palantir "further weakened the market's bearish logic of intensifying competition in the AI industry." It is called one of the most clear beneficiaries in the wave of enterprise AI implementation. "The acceleration of commercial demand proves that the company is enjoying the same industry dividends as the leading native AI enterprises in the market." It added: "The sharp recovery of US commercial business has dispelled the market's concerns about slowing growth, and we expect the stock price to see a significant upward trend."

Guolian Minsheng Securities pointed out that the core value of FDE is to transform model capabilities into business results that can be integrated into enterprise production systems. The main difficulties of current AI implementation lie not only in model capabilities, but also in whether enterprises can identify real demands, complete scenario verification, access original systems and continue operations. It has opened up the value chain of "traditional software service capabilities - AI project implementation - productization precipitation".

The institution further stated that FDE is expected to become one of the important factors for the value revaluation of the current computer sector. With the improvement of AI's participation in software development, the value of traditional software services formed solely by code development and manpower input is facing re-evaluation. The focus of industry competition has gradually shifted to who can understand customer business, promote AI into the production environment and continuously create business results. The competition among current AI enterprises is shifting from competing for model parameters to competing for business implementation capabilities, and compound talents who can understand both technology and business and take responsibility for project results are still relatively scarce.

It emphasized that FDE is expected to become an important organizational form connecting model vendors, software service providers and industry customers, and enable the customer resources, industry experience, implementation teams and solution capabilities owned by traditional computer enterprises to re-embody value in the AI era. When judging the value of enterprise AI business, in addition to model and technical capabilities, we should also focus on investigating whether it has an FDE team and whether it can precipitate project experience into replicable products and industry solutions.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Sci-Tech Innovation Board Daily", Author: Zhang Zhen, released with authorization from 36Kr.