Something quietly inverted in Salesforce delivery over the last year, and most teams haven't repriced their work to match. An agent can now author a permission set, refactor an Apex batch class, write the test coverage, generate a data-migration script, and open a clean merge request — in minutes, without complaint, at a level of craft that would have been a mid-level developer's afternoon. The bottleneck everyone spent a decade optimizing — can we build it fast enough? — has largely dissolved.

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.

The most convincing AI proof of concept you can run isn't a presentation — it's a working Agent Loop, running live against one of your buyer's real projects, with live monitoring, built in two to three weeks. Everything else is theater.

If you're selling an agentic operating system and your pitch still leads with slides, you're already losing to the company that just showed up with a working prototype.

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.