FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEERS

An engineer who works in your building, not on your account.

Forward Deployed Engineering puts experienced engineers inside the business, where they can see the problems worth solving and build the AI solutions that solve them. alliant brings that model to mid-market companies.

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DEFINITION

What a Forward Deployed Engineer actually is.

A Forward Deployed Engineer is a senior technologist who embeds with your team on-site rather than working from a delivery center against a written specification.

They do two jobs that are normally split between two firms and rarely connected: finding the opportunity and building the solution. The person who sees your team re-keying data between three systems is the same person who writes the thing that stops it.

Forward Deployed Engineering is built around a simple idea: Requirements documents lose the details that matter, and the details that matter are usually the reason the software fails.

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE

What actually happens

WEEKS 1-2

They show up.

Your FDE works from your office. They sit with operations, finance, sales, and service. They watch the workarounds, the spreadsheet everyone depends on, the report that takes two days to produce and is wrong by the time it lands. No workshop. No discovery deck. Observation.

WEEKS 3-4

They come back with a ranked list, in dollars.

Not a maturity assessment. A short list of specific opportunities, each with what it’s worth, what it takes to build, and what it will take to get people to use it. You decide what’s worth doing.

WEEKS 5-12

They build.

Working software in front of your users inside weeks, not a demo at the end of a quarter. You see it early enough to change it, which is the only point at which changing it is cheap.

ONGOING

They stay until it sticks.

Adoption is where most AI dies. Your FDE stays through rollout, training, and refinement, and hands off something your team owns and understands – including the option to hand it off completely.

THE COMPARISON

FDE model vs. traditional consulting

	Traditional consulting	Staff augmentation	AI software vendor	alliant FDE
Where the work happens	Their office	Your office	Their cloud	Your office
Who diagnoses	Partner + analysts	You do	Their sales engineer	The engineer who builds it
What you get	Recommendations	Hands	A license	A working accelerator you own
Fit to your business	Built to a written spec	Built to your instructions	Built to their roadmap	Built from observed reality
First value	End of the engagement	Depends on your direction	At implementation	Weeks
Model is built around	Engagement	Contract	Software license	Business outcome

LEADERSHIP

Kristofer Low

Head of AI Solutions & Forward Deployed Engineering

Kristofer Low is Alliant’s Head of AI Solutions and Forward Deployed Engineering. He leads the firm’s AI solution delivery practice, bringing together strategy, engineering, and hands-on execution to identify, build, and scale high-value AI solutions for clients.

He brings more than 12 years of experience delivering enterprise AI, industrial technology, and digital transformation initiatives, including work with Fortune 500 organizations in regulated and operationally complex environments. His experience spans generative and agentic AI, intelligent workflow automation, predictive analytics and optimization, enterprise search, and AI-powered knowledge solutions.

FAQ

The questions we get asked

Isn’t this just an expensive contractor?

A contractor executes your plan. An FDE tells you your plan is targeting the third-most-valuable problem and shows you the first — then builds it.

We don’t have clean data.

Nobody does. Part of the FDE’s first month is establishing what’s actually usable and designing around what isn’t. Data readiness is a workstream, not a prerequisite.

What if the engineer leaves and we’re stranded?

Everything is documented and built to be operated by your team. Handoff is a deliverable, not a favor. Where you’d rather we keep running it, alliant Managed Services can.

Our team will see this as a threat

The ones that work are the ones your team asks for by name. That’s why your FDE spends the first weeks with your people rather than with your executives — and why we don’t build things nobody wanted.

Engagements start with a fixed-scope diagnostic so you can see the value before you commit to the build.

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OPPORTUNITY ASSESSMENT

Find out what an FDE would find in your business.

Start with an AI Opportunity Assessment to identify where AI could create the most value in your business
and which opportunities are worth pursuing first.

Speak to our team