The Rise of AI Field Engineers (FDEs)

As AI companies move from impressive demos to real-world enterprise deployment, the hardest problems are no longer just about model quality. They’re about understanding customer needs, adapting AI products to real workflows, navigating complex integrations, and delivering sustainable business outcomes.

This is where AI Field Engineers (FDEs) — and adjacent roles across product, engineering, customer engineering, and technical GTM — are becoming increasingly important.

Join AI builders, engineering leaders, implementation practitioners, and enterprise adoption experts for a practical conversation about what it actually takes to deploy AI in production.

We’ll bring together perspectives across product building, production engineering, enterprise implementation, and go-to-market, followed by dinner and open networking with fellow Bay Area AI builders and practitioners.

Agenda

6:20 – 6:30 PM | Doors Open & Check-in
6:30 – 7:15 PM | Panel Discussion
7:15 – 9:00 PM | Dinner & Open Networking

Speakers

Moderator

Kathy Liu — NA GTM Manager, Kuse.ai / Junior.so

Kathy Liu is the North America GTM Manager at Kuse.ai / Junior.so, an AI coworker platform that integrates natively with Slack and Teams. As the company’s first North America go-to-market hire, she owns outbound, paid acquisition, UGC growth, and partnerships end-to-end.

She built out Junior’s forward-deployed engineer (FDE) sales motion and drove 100M+ content views in her first quarter of growth work. Kathy is a Cornell alum.

Panelists

Li Shen — Founding Engineer & SVP, PingCAP (TiDB)

Li Shen is the Founding Engineer & SVP of TiDB and a maintainer of several widely used open-source projects, including TiDB and TiKV.

He brings extensive experience across data infrastructure, AI/ML, and cloud computing, with deep expertise in building and scaling production-grade systems.

Annie Xu — Staff Customer Engineer & Team Lead, Google Cloud

Annie works at the intersection of technology and business outcomes. She has spent more than a decade in customer and engineering roles, helping companies translate complex technologies — from data platforms and cloud platforms to LLMs — into systems that actually work in the real world.

Her recent focus is on human-centered AI: how we design AI systems and prepare people and organizations to work effectively alongside them. A builder by nature, she is especially drawn to problems where judgment matters as much as the code.

Shuhao Zhang — Co-Founder & CPO, TinyFish

Shuhao began coding with one belief: technology can simplify our lives. That insight led to the creation of TinyFish, where he is building technology that makes every webpage programmable and connects language models with practical, real-world tasks.

Previously, he led a team at Meta building next-generation mobile infrastructure powering the Meta suite. At Edison Software, he scaled the engineering team from 1 to 100 through the company’s acquisition by YipitData. Earlier, at Nuance Communications, he built Mobile Care, which was deployed on more than 10 million devices.

Who Should Attend

This event is for you if you are:

Building an AI product and figuring out how to deploy it within real customer environments

Working directly with customers on implementation, integration, or technical delivery

Leading AI adoption or innovation inside an enterprise organization

Exploring how product, engineering, and customer-facing teams should collaborate

Interested in becoming an FDE, Solutions Engineer, Customer Engineer, or technical GTM practitioner

Looking to meet other Bay Area builders working on practical AI deployment challenges

You do not need to hold the title "Field Engineer" to attend. This event is designed for anyone involved in turning AI capabilities into real, usable, and scalable systems.

Who's in the Room

Host

CREAO is the AI operating system for businesses — a reliable, secure platform where AI agents can build, execute, and improve real workflows over time. It remembers how you work and gives businesses the infrastructure to move from using AI tools to running on AI.

Partners

Google Cloud provides AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration technologies that help organizations build, deploy, and scale modern applications. Its integrated AI stack spans cloud infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models, development platforms, and AI-powered applications used by organizations around the world.

Kuse is a human-centered AI workspace that helps teams turn scattered knowledge, data, and files into ready-to-use business outcomes, including documents, presentations, and web pages. Since launching in 2025, Kuse has grown to serve users across enterprises, schools, and organizations around the world.

TiDB, created by PingCAP, is an open-source distributed SQL database designed for modern, data-intensive applications. It combines elastic scaling, real-time analytics, and continuous data availability in a single database platform, and is used by companies across technology, financial services, travel, gaming, and other industries.

TinyFish builds enterprise infrastructure for AI web agents, making complex, dynamic websites programmable for AI. Its platform enables companies to run large-scale web workflows — from data extraction and monitoring to booking and other real-world tasks — with the observability and adaptability required for production environments.