What Is Forward Deployed Engineering? The Playbook Behind AI That Actually Ships

Description and use

<p><em>Originally published at <a href="https://trida.ai/blog/what-is-forward-deployed-engineering-the-model-behind-ai-that-actually-ships" rel="noopener noreferrer">Trida AI</a>.</em></p> <h2> The demo is not the product </h2> <p>A frontier model connected to a clean CSV will demo beautifully. Production is a different environment: data behind SSO and a permission model the model has to respect, documents in five formats and three decades of inconsistent naming, a system of record with no API for the one field you need, PII that cannot leave the VPC, and users who will abandon the tool after

Problem

<p><em>Originally published at <a href="https://trida.ai/blog/what-is-forward-deployed-engineering-the-model-behind-ai-that-actually-ships" rel="noopener noreferrer">Trida AI</a>.</em></p> <h2> The demo is not the product </h2> <p>A frontier model connected to a clean CSV will demo beautifully. Production is a different environment: data behind SSO and a permission model the model has to respect, documents in five formats and three decades of inconsistent naming, a system of record with no API for the one field you need, PII that cannot leave the VPC, and users who will abandon the tool after

Outcome

<p><em>Originally published at <a href="https://trida.ai/blog/what-is-forward-deployed-engineering-the-model-behind-ai-that-actually-ships" rel="noopener noreferrer">Trida AI</a>.</em></p> <h2> The demo is not the product </h2> <p>A frontier model connected to a clean CSV will demo beautifully. Production is a different environment: data behind SSO and a permission model the model has to respect, documents in five formats and three decades of inconsistent naming, a system of record with no API for the one field you need, PII that cannot leave the VPC, and users who will abandon the tool after

Evidence

What Is Forward Deployed Engineering? The Playbook Behind AI That Actually Ships

Source