Forbes Speaks with Gritmind on the Future of Forward-Deployed Engineering

Forbes & Gritmind Collaborate on the Future of Forward-Deployed Engineering

This week, Forbes ran a piece on the rise of forward-deployed engineering, and it included a few thoughts from a conversation I had with the reporter, Ron Schmelzer (Forbes, September 19, 2026). The piece is about something I’ve been watching for over a year: OpenAI- and Anthropic-backed ventures partnering with and buying up AI implementation firms.. On paper, that’s an acquisition trend. In practice, it’s an admission that the model was never the hard part. Getting a working system into a real business, with its exceptions and its undocumented process knowledge, is.

What is a forward-deployed engineer?

A forward-deployed engineer works inside a client’s operations, not just on a model or a demo, to build and ship an AI system that fits how the business actually runs. The role blends engineering with the kind of process discovery a consultant would normally do: you’re in the client’s workflows, talking to the people who do the job, before you write a line of production code. It’s a title that’s become common at AI labs and their portfolio companies over the past year, but the practice itself isn’t new to firms like ours.

Do companies need a dedicated forward-deployed engineer?

Not always, and I’d push back on the idea that every company needs to hire one full time. What most companies actually need is the discovery work: sitting with the team, mapping the real process, and finding where the model’s judgment can be trusted and where it can’t. A small, focused team can do that in a matter of weeks without becoming a permanent embedded hire.

The harder problem is almost never the model’s capability. It’s the undocumented process knowledge sitting in someone’s head that never made it into a spec.

How this connects to the Forbes feature

The Forbes conversation came together through Kaunas IN, the city’s technology-promotion organization, which had invited Ron Schmelzer to Kaunas to highlight the city’s tech sector. Kaunas IN connected him with our leadership, “and I ended up meeting him in person at our Kaunas office for a conversation. We talked through how we think about implementation work at Gritmind and the trends we are seeing from our unique perspective of helping enterprise clients adopt and drive value from AI. We talked through how we think about implementation work at Gritmind, and that’s what made it into the piece.

What we build

This is what we build at Gritmind: production AI systems that start with a specific business process, not a general capability. If that’s the kind of problem you’re working on, take a look at our work.