FDE: an engineer on the floor, until the tool is used
Forward Deployed Engineer is not a trendy title. It is someone who stays with the business long enough for the PoC to leave the demo.
You hear “FDE” everywhere. Often wrongly. It is not a consultant who runs a workshop and sends a deck. It is not a developer parked for six months with no target either.
The model comes from teams who learned one thing: a tool, especially AI, does not get adopted on its own. You need someone on the floor, who sees the real file, the real refusals, the real workarounds.
The problem we keep seeing
A PoC exists. It even works in a demo. Monday morning, people go back to Excel. Nobody owns the last mile: access, data, the annoying exception, the run cost.
What the mission looks like
Bounded process. Integration into tools you already have. Short training. A fee stated before we start. Then a handover — or maintenance if you want us to keep the run.
Duration follows the perimeter. Same logic as the assessment. We do not sell an open-ended “AI squad”.