The skillset is different. SAs everywhere I’ve worked are solidly salespeople. They can do AE work in a pinch, they use Salesforce, they know how to understand the state of an account, etc. They tend to be more limited technically and as such are generally deployed for the sale of a product which is “finished”, and as such spend most of their time mapping customers onto existing patterns that are already known to work, and identifying those patterns.

FDEs are different in that they’re deployed to sell and integrate products which are unfinished in some way. For example Palantir sold a fairly low-level generalized product which required bespoke technical work to integrate with a customer. This integration work is more like normal engineering work in that lots of code may have to be written and there’s technical creativity required. The reason why FDE is increasingly in vogue now is because AI companies haven’t yet found a high-level product shape which is generalizable across many customers, because the market is immature and customers probably don’t know what they want. So there’s lots of engineering work required to take a lower-level offering (e.g some sort of agent) and figure out how to use it to generate value for one particular customer.