A guide to custom AI software for business leaders
What custom AI software is, when it's worth building instead of buying, how a project usually runs, and what to ask a firm before you hire one.
Forward-deployed team
Engineers who work inside your business
A forward-deployed team is a few of our engineers and architects placed inside your organization. They attend your meetings, use your systems and get to know the people involved. From there they find problems worth solving, build software to solve them and keep improving it, while your leadership decides the order. It suits organizations with a steady supply of problems rather than one fixed project.
When this makes sense
- 01
You can see more problems worth solving than a single project would cover.
- 02
Your people know the business well but you don't have engineers who build AI software.
- 03
Priorities shift every quarter, so a fixed scope would be stale before it was delivered.
- 04
Software is already live and needs someone to keep improving it as people use it.
What's involved
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Engineers and architects on site
They join your teams, work in your tools and pick up the context that never makes it into a requirements document.
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A running list of problems
They keep finding and sizing new opportunities. Your leadership sets the order.
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Short build cycles
Each piece of work is designed, built, tested and put into use before the next one starts.
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Skills that stay
They pair with your staff so that, over time, your own people can run and extend what's been built.
What you get
Every project follows the same five stages, and each stage ends with something you can review.
- Engineers and architects in your team
- Ranked backlog
- Software in production
- Documentation and trained staff
Forward-deployed team: common questions
What is a forward-deployed engineer?
An engineer who works inside the client's organization instead of at a distance. They learn the problem from the people who have it, then build and adjust the software where it's being used.
What does a forward-deployed architect do?
The architect decides how the software fits your existing systems, data, security and operations, and keeps the design coherent as more gets built. The engineers do most of the building.
How is this different from staff augmentation?
Augmented staff take tickets from a backlog someone else wrote. A forward-deployed team is responsible for finding the problems, proposing solutions and delivering them. Your leadership still decides what comes first.
Further reading
What is a forward-deployed engineer?
A forward-deployed engineer works inside the client's organization, learning the problem from the people who have it and building software where it's used.
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