Enterprise AI Deployment Market: The Forward-Deployed Engineer — New Book

The Forward-Deployed Engineer is a new book in The Business Engineer Foundation Series that codifies the role and operating model of engineers embedded in customer organizations to convert general AI capability into production value. The essay explains the FDE motion — discovery in the field, building reusable artifacts (playbook → toolkit → product), the wedge scorecard for first deployments, metrics for measuring compounding leverage, and institutional sovereignty concerns (ownership, portability, lock-in). The piece situates the FDE as a response to commoditized model access and argues the field role is critical to capture deployment residue and turn services into productized capabilities.