Deployed

An illustrated, hands-on guide for engineers who take AI into real companies and make it work.

Forward deployed engineers (FDEs) work inside a customer's business, with their data, their security reviews, their old systems, and their busy teams. This book shows how that work gets done, through one deployment you follow from the first meeting to the handover.

You'll learn how to:

Turn a vague request into a first slice you can ship and measureMap an unfamiliar company's systems, data, and gatekeepers in the first weekGet an AI system through security and compliance reviewBuild LLM and agent systems with citations, guardrails, and human reviewTest quality with evaluation sets built from real casesRoll out safely, keep cost per case under control, and hand the system overIt works as a workbook too. Every chapter has hand-drawn diagrams, decisions to make, worksheets to fill in, and exercises you can try at your current job, with 55 field kits and templates in all.

The case files cover 18 real events, including an airline held responsible for its chatbot's answer and a trading firm that lost hundreds of millions of dollars in 45 minutes after a bad deployment. Each is read for what an FDE would have done differently.

For your career, there are playbooks for ten industries, eight portfolio projects, a 90-day plan, and a full chapter on the FDE interview with 30 practice questions.

Written for software engineers moving into forward deployed, applied AI, or solutions architect roles, and for managers building teams that do this work.