Forward-Deployed Engineering

First Recon AI engineers embed with your teams and build production AI inside your business. The work starts with one use case, the foundations go in with it, and security is in from the first commit.

Forward-deployed engineering (FDE) is applied AI at its most direct: built inside a business instead of delivered to it. A small team of engineers and strategists joins yours, works in your systems on a specific problem, and takes what it builds to production.

Built on your own data, systems, and operations, bespoke AI and agents earn their keep: insight the business has never had, work that no longer waits on people, and workflows that were not possible before.

What worked carries into the next use case, and the one after that. You keep the working systems and the people who run them.

From concept to production, continuously

This work is too ambiguous to spec up front: what works only shows up in production. So strategy, build, and security run as one loop, and each turn leaves capability with your team.

Strategy before production

Plans are set before anyone sees what works live.

Strategy in production

Strategy and build move together in cycles of weeks.

Security at the end

Reviews arrive once the build is done.

Security in the loop

Controls and evidence ship inside every cycle.

Team handoffs

Context is rebuilt each time work changes hands.

A standing team

Business, IT, security, and engineering stay in the same room through delivery.

Decisions before evidence

Priorities rest on assumptions.

Continuous evidence

Priorities reset on live usage and business results.

A static deliverable

The deck ages as soon as the business moves.

A living strategy system

The plan moves with the business.

Speed to impact

The industries differ, the patterns repeat. First builds go where impact arrives fastest, and that is usually one of these six. Each one lays foundations for the rest of your AI portfolio.

Document operations

Agents that draft, check, and route the contracts, claims, and reports your teams handle by hand.

Customer operations

Support copilots that answer from your knowledge and hand the hard calls to people.

Company knowledge

One place to ask the questions that today die in shared drives and inboxes.

Process automation

Agents inside the workflows where exceptions pile up: intake, reconciliation, approvals.

Decision support

Analysis on live operational data, delivered where the decision gets made.

Engineering acceleration

AI in the software lifecycle, with review points your security team owns.

Decide

Each build starts with a business case and a named owner.

Design

Shape agent roles, the sources they may use, and the security model around them.

Build

Ship working agents with quality checks and a clear path to production.

Engineers and strategists on one team

The team that scopes the work builds it, and a production review every two to four weeks decides what happens next.

Control

Set data boundaries and review points with the build, not after it.

Coach

Advise executives as the real decisions get made, and bring your teams through the work alongside us.

Scale

What the first build proves decides what gets built next.

The talent bar

Every team we field carries substantial experience across five disciplines. A team without all five does not get staffed, and projects are led only by senior AI experts.

That standard limits how many engagements we run at once, and which ones we accept.

Behind the senior core sits our partnership with Elios: a deep bench across AI and software engineering that lets a program grow from one embedded team into a sustained transformation effort without lowering the bar.

  • Business
  • IT
  • Consulting
  • Software engineering
  • AI engineering

Security built in

The same team builds the AI and the controls around it. We build enterprise AI security software for a living, and it shows in the build order: controls and evidence go in on day one.

  • Source boundaries. Which data the agents may touch, decided before the first build.
  • Permission model. Which people and which agents may act, written down and enforced.
  • Human review points. The calls that stay with people.
  • Evidence trail. Audit records come out of the build itself.

The first year

A first-year program takes several use cases to production. Each one lands faster than the last, because the foundations and the trained operators carry over.

Every two to four weeks the work goes in front of your leadership as running software, with the numbers it moved.

Everything of value stays with you: the code in your repositories, the systems in your tenancy, and operators who can run and extend the work.

Shared foundations Data patterns, guardrails, and evaluation built once, then carried into every build that follows.
The review packet
  • Use-case map. Every use case, its owner, and its status against the business case.
  • Source boundary. The data each agent can reach, and the record of what it actually touched.
  • Working software. The system itself, running in the process it serves.
  • Quality review. Where the agents are right, where they miss, and which decisions remain with people.
  • Control rules. The review points and exceptions in force, current as of that review.
  • Adoption brief. Who uses it, how often, and what stands between here and the next team.

Three ways in

Start small without starting slow. The leadership workshop ends with decisions you can act on. The first use case is already production work.

Leadership workshop

A working session with your executive team: where AI moves your business first, and what it takes to get there. You leave with a ranked shortlist your organization can act on.

AI readiness diagnostic

A structured review of what stalls AI delivery in your organization, across data, security, and operations. You leave with the plan to clear it.

The first use case

One problem, one embedded team, working software in production. See the work before you commit to a program.

Applied AI,
built in your business.