The AI FDE Certification Cohort 11: The v1.1 Curriculum


Hey Reader,

The AI FDE Certification is now open for enrollment for Cohort 11, running September 29 to December 10, 2026.

Today, I want to share whatโ€™s new in the v1.1 curriculum, including the tools, techniques, and engineering practices weโ€™ll be covering this fall.

This cohort builds on what we have learned across our previous programs and our 2026 work with enterprise teams, with the curriculum now focused on the emerging Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role.

If you haven't heard of this role, take a look at the job descriptions from Anthropic and OpenAI (and Google, etc). These are the people that enterprise leaders around the world are hiring to drive AI transformation for their companies.

Instead of relying on big tech consultants, you could be the one driving AI transformation through your company.

Our course is designed to help you get started.

At the very least, it will help you understand everything that fancy AI consultants and FDEs your company hires will say in future meetings.

Curriculum

The curriculum keeps evolving, too. This year, weโ€™ve been focused on helping AI Engineers within enterprises ship prototypes to production, and you'll see that reflected in our updates.

That means more production-ready development workflows, practical approaches to enterprise data restrictions, new ways to build and evaluate agents, and a bigger focus on security.

Hereโ€™s what weโ€™ve added for v1.1:

  • The Enterprise IDE: VS Code + Claude Code
  • Use Cases: Defined by students, aligned with their companies
  • Synthetic Data: Local, open models eliminate excuses
  • Agentic search: Build LLM Wikis, engage directly with corpus
  • Architecture: Tools, Skills, subagents, MCP, UTCP Code Mode
  • Harness and loop engineering for long-running agents
  • Observability from monitoring --> business metrics
  • Adversarial security: prompt injection, context bombing
  • Multimodal AI: video search, multi-agent voice applications

The curriculum is increasingly focused on connecting core AI Engineering concepts and code to both product thinking and operating with existing production systems.

The AI Forward Deployed Engineer should be able to move across the entire AI product development lifecycle.

Who it's for

We built this course specifically for engineers at enterprises whose companies directly support their use case.

AI is officially at the center of our entire economy, and businesses are taking notice. If you work for one of these businesses, this course might be for you.

Pricing

This is the course your company wishes they knew about, so they can send you and pay for it. It's $5,250: your company will walk away with a fully functional prototype and detailed report on all technical and product decisions, while you walk away with 10 weeks of hands-on learning, community support, an iterated soup-to-nuts product leadership experience, the ability to push what you have to production, and the capability to solve future AI challenges with whatever team you're part of next.

Our Instructors

Cohort 11 (v 1.1) will be taught by:

Myself, Dr. Greg Loughnane, Ph.D.โ€‹
AI Makerspace

โ€‹https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregloughnane/โ€‹

Plus, Matthew Sharpโ€‹
AI Engineer, Professor and Podcast Host
โ€‹https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewsharp/โ€‹

And we're adding in Tyler Laughlinโ€‹
Information Systems Engineer, Adobe
โ€‹https://www.linkedin.com/in/tykanoalaughlin/โ€‹

I look forward to seeing the impact that Cohort 11 students make at their companies and in their own careers over the next 6-18 months.

We are still at just the beginning of the transformation of every industry. There's never been a better time to get in the game.

Cheers,

Dr. Greg Loughnane, Ph.D.
Owner/CEO
AI Makerspace