Every services firm runs on the same hidden equation, whether or not anyone has written it down: revenue is a function of headcount. To grow, you hire. To take on more work, you staff up. To protect margin, you push utilization. The whole apparatus of an agency, a consultancy, or a professional-services firm is a machine for converting human time into invoices, and the better you run it, the more cleanly that conversion happens.

A forward deployed engineer (FDE) is a senior engineer who embeds directly inside your team, learns how your business actually works, and ships the first working solution in your real environment — not a slide deck or a proof-of-concept that dies in a demo. The model pairs product-grade engineering with on-the-ground context, so what gets built solves the problem you actually have.

There is a quiet assumption buried in most enterprise AI adoption: that the path to better output is a better single prompt. Refine the wording, add more context, raise the stakes in the instruction, and the model will eventually produce the answer you wanted. That assumption is responsible for a lot of plateaued AI programs. It treats a probabilistic system as if it had one best answer waiting to be unlocked by the right key.

2023 was a hard year for Facet. We felt the crunch of many of our current and prospective partners get squeezed by real economic factors — internal restructuring, and downsizing. We’ve seen projects that were eagerly awaited in 2022 get wiped off the map in 2023, and some departments completely removed (for the time being).

These economic realities are the harness which innovation must ride — and as strategic partners to digital endeavors, Facet ambled along, sometimes blind to the next challenge around the corner.