This week: the hottest enterprise AI role, co-working and Founder Lounge at the Harvard Club, Rooftop Drinks, and community updates.
First, our upcoming F&O Events:
Our afternoon co-working returns this Friday. Last session covered a lot of real ground: finding your voice on LinkedIn, pricing in fractional advisory settings, and pre-seed outbound plus network activation. Bring what you're working on, get input from the room. Option to stay for drinks after at our Friday Lounge. Come join us. [→ RSVP HERE, 10 spots]
What follows a productive Friday Afternoon? Our second F&O Friday Lounge.
Come join us at the Harvard Club for a casual wind down, and debrief Q2, Independence Day, the latest World Cup drama, what you’re building, or whatever is top of mind. Curated room in a unique members club setting.
[→ RSVP HERE, 10 spots]
Our recurring rooftop night is back. Sunset over the skyline, drinks above the city, and 20+ NYC founders, operators, and creators. No pitches, no BDRs, just good peer-to-peer conversation in a non-transactional space.
Next Tuesday, July 14.
[→ RSVP HERE, limited spots]
On to our editorial piece: The Rise of the AI Strategist
The Forward Deployed Engineer and the GTM Engineer have been the two seats every AI-native company has been racing to fill. With enterprise AI running hot, a third persona is emerging: Meet the AI Strategist.
The Race to Win Enterprise AI
Enterprises face urgent pressure to adopt AI. Boards want a plan. Competitors are moving. Every quarter without an "AI initiative" looks like lost ground. So the budgets have opened up: mid-market and large enterprises are allocating real dollars to figure out how to make AI work and deliver value inside their organization.
The problem: they don't have the internal capacity or talent to deploy it. Traditional IT can't move fast enough. Legacy consultancies can strategize but can't ship. Product-only AI vendors sell tools that never get adopted.
So enterprises are turning to AI-native firms that combine a product with a real deployment layer: Hebbia, Sierra, Glean, Harvey, OpenAI’s and Anthropic's enterprise arms. These firms connect into legacy ERPs, surface and structure organizational data, make tools available firmwide, and capture the workflows and context that make AI actually useful on the ground.
That's where the money is flowing in 2026. And it's created the demand for a new role: the AI Strategist.
The Three Hottest Seats in AI in 2026
The AI Strategist. The new kid on the block. Maps the org, manages the politics, sequences the deployment, translates between engineering and executive sponsors in enterprise settings. Ex-MBB with technical instincts, or the technical operator with commercial chops. Without them, the FDE builds something the org can't absorb.
The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE). The Palantir model. An engineer embedded inside the customer, integrating deeply into their workflows and tech stack. Ships against reality, not the demo.
The GTM Engineer. The Clay-flavored role. Go-to-market is now as much a data enrichment and automation game as it is a relationship and outbound one. This role builds the pipeline systems that surface the right accounts at the right time.
Why the AI Strategist Is Emerging Now
Enterprise AI deployment isn't just a technical problem. It's organizational and political: Which stakeholder needs the win. Whose budget lives where. Which workflow to touch first, and which to leave alone. What the CFO wants to hear vs. what the head of ops needs to hear. An FDE ships against a spec or PRD. A GTM Engineer optimizes a funnel. Neither has the tempo or vocabulary to map an org's political geography and steer a multi-quarter deployment through it. That's the AI Strategist's job.
The archetype we see winning: 3-6 years of top-tier strategy or product ops, comfortable in a boardroom, but who's also written code, shipped internal tools, and knows what a Claude API call looks like. Or someone with a technical/FDE background who’s picked up the commercial and relationship skills along the way.
Where This Shows Up: NYC Hiring Trends
A quick scan of current NYC hiring pages shows the pattern. These roles are no longer theoretical: they are showing up across companies and verticals:
Community Updates
We're 1,000+ members and counting. Thank you for being part of the journey. If you're new here, our manifesto explains why we exist and how we work. Read our manifesto.
To get involved, share something with the community, or say hello: [email protected].
See you soon,
Stephan & the NYC F&O Team