The AI labs have quietly revived an old job title. OpenAI, Anthropic and a long list of AI vendors are hiring forward deployed engineers, FDEs: people who sit with the customer, understand the business problem, build the solution and stay until it actually works. Not a consultant who leaves a slide deck. Not an engineer who waits for a ticket. Both, in one person, embedded in the client’s reality.

I watched yet another explainer about the role this week, and my first reaction was recognition. That’s the work I’ve been doing for the past year. Just not in code-heavy enterprise deployments. In marketing and sales, for companies that don’t have an IT department.

The gap nobody is serving

Large companies get FDEs. They buy an AI platform, and the vendor sends a team to make it stick. Small and mid-sized companies get something else entirely: a newsletter full of AI tips, a webinar, maybe an agency quote for a project that takes four months and assumes a tech stack they don’t have.

So the gap is this. A twenty-person company knows AI could save them hours every week in quoting, follow-ups, content, lead handling or reporting. They just don’t have anyone who can sit down with them, figure out which of those matters, and build it. Their marketing person is busy running marketing. Their IT is a friend of the founder’s who comes in on Fridays.

That company doesn’t need a strategy. It needs someone forward deployed.

What forward-deployed marketing looks like

In practice, the work looks less like consulting and more like a short, focused build sprint. A recent example, anonymized: a regional company with a good product and a sales process that lived in inboxes. Leads came in through three channels, nobody had an overview, and follow-ups depended on who remembered. We didn’t start with a CRM selection project. We started with one afternoon of mapping how a lead actually travels through the company, and then built a lightweight tool that captured, sorted and reminded. It was in use within two weeks. The CRM conversation came later, informed by real data.

Other builds look different: a small website rebuilt in days instead of months, a quoting assistant, a content workflow, a dashboard that finally answers the question the founder asks every Monday. The common thread is not the technology. It’s the sequence: understand the business, build something small that works, get it adopted, then scale what proves itself.

Why marketing and sales first

I don’t claim to be an FDE for every function. I’m a marketer with twenty years of experience who now builds. That focus matters for three reasons.

First, marketing and sales are where small companies feel AI’s promise most and capture least of it. The use cases are everywhere: leads, content, outreach, follow-up, reporting.

Second, building the right thing requires understanding the commercial logic. A lead tool built by someone who has never run a sales funnel solves the wrong problem elegantly.

Third, these builds don’t need a heavy stack. Today’s AI tools let one experienced person ship what used to require a small agency, without locking the client into infrastructure they can’t maintain.

What changes for the client

The biggest shift is not the tool. It’s that the company stops treating AI as a future topic and starts treating it as a normal way of working. Every build is also a training session. The team sees how it was made, learns to adjust it and starts spotting the next opportunity themselves. A good forward-deployed engagement should make itself smaller over time.

The honest caveat

I’m not a software engineer, and I don’t pretend to be. When a project needs real engineering, such as complex integrations, security-critical systems or large data platforms, that’s when a proper engineering team should come in. Part of the job is knowing where that line is and saying so early.

But most of what small and mid-sized companies need right now sits well below that line. They need someone who understands their market, sits at their table and builds. Call it forward-deployed marketing. I just call it the work.

If you want that inside your company, this is what Just build at Marketing March is for.