Makati Firm Amihan is spending $1 Million to train 2,000 Filipino AI engineers
Amihan has only about 50 trained and certified engineers in the Philippines right now, against a year-end target of about 100.
by Chris Castro
Published on Nov 12, 2026
Makati-based Amihan Global Strategies is spending about $1 million to train Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), the people who get AI to actually work inside companies.
At the start of this year, only 5 to 10 percent of companies planned to hire forward-deployed engineers. By the end of the second quarter, that figure had jumped to 70 percent, according to executive search firm Christian & Timbers. Most people have not heard of the job, and the firm is betting $1 million that the Philippines can become the place the world goes to find them.
Who the Heck Are These "FDEs"?
Forward Deployed Engineers, or FDEs, work inside enterprises and turn frontier AI into systems that run in production.
The rush to hire them follows from corporate AI mostly failing to pay off. The same Christian & Timbers study found that fewer than one in five companies report meaningful returns on their AI investments, a gap it links to a shortage of engineers who can move AI into production.
The firm estimates that only about 2,000 engineers in the United States have both the industry expertise and the applied AI skills to reliably deliver enterprise AI results, and a broader count of FDEs stays small.
“There’s only about 10,000 in the US, which is really not that big considering how much the demand is in the world,” according to Winston Damarillo, chairman of Amihan Global Strategies.
Amihan has launched the Amihan FDE Academy and is putting about $1 million behind it.
“About a million dollars. About a million dollars we will allocate,” Damarillo said.
Through the academy and partnerships with Mapúa, National University, and the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), Amihan wants to help build a pool of 1,000 to 2,000 FDEs in the Philippines.
“The first mission is to make sure that the world knows that there’s a healthy and abundant supply of FDEs in the Philippines,” Damarillo said.
The main customer is the United States. Damarillo sees a full circle in this, since much of the pioneering AI technology came from US labs that are now investing in countries able to supply the people to deploy it.
“Once we cross a thousand certified FDEs in the country, people will take notice,” he said.
How Far Does the $1 Million Stretch?
Most of the money goes to the time Amihan’s engineers spend building while they teach, since the trainers there are also working builders.
“The investment is almost like building software for us. We’re going to invest R&D [research and development] on the training, not just for our use, but to make sure it’s propagated,” Damarillo said.
The academy’s partners are Anthropic, Amazon Web Services (AWS), SpaceX Super Intelligence (SpaceXSI), and Nous Research’s Hermes Agent. Participants learn to build agents on Anthropic’s Claude, design secure and scalable AI on AWS, and speed up engineering with SpaceXSI’s Grok and Cursor. They compare platforms side by side, with governance built in from day one.
“We teach what we’ve actually shipped. No single platform wins every problem. What lasts is a team that can govern, integrate, and ship across all of them,” according to Amihan President Jerry Rapes.
The academy also exists because the frontier labs’ own deployment teams serve their largest global accounts first, which leaves everyone else waiting in line. Amihan’s answer is to build the talent in-house: its FDEs, who have spent years inside the country’s largest banks, telcos, and conglomerates, train a client’s own engineers on that client’s own systems.
The program also aims to help the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry move into higher-value AI work.
“Every enterprise will become an agentic enterprise, and every one of them will need builders. The question for every Philippine CEO is whether those builders sit inside your company or inside your competitor’s,” Damarillo said.
The government has signed on as well. Amihan has a training agreement with DOST’s Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI) to teach AI fluency and agentic engineering to its scientists and engineers.
Amihan now has about 22 prompt engineers and about 50 trained and certified engineers, against a year-end target of about 100.“We’re just beginning,” Damarillo said.