The question
I’m building forwarddeploy.fyi around a question I keep coming back to:
If two companies can pay for access to the same AI model, what will make one better at using it?
I think a large part of the answer lies in what each company knows—and how much of that knowledge it can put to work.
Every business has its own history. It knows things about its customers. It has tried things that worked and things that didn’t. Its people have learned when to follow the process and when something needs a closer look.
Some of this is in databases. Some is buried in documents and conversations. Some lives entirely in someone’s head.
A powerful model doesn’t automatically have that understanding. We have to find ways to give it the right context.
Imagine asking AI what your company should sell next month. To give you a useful answer, it would need to know what customers are asking for, what you have in stock, where you make money, and what happened the last time you tried something similar. It would also need to understand what you’re trying to achieve.
That’s the part of AI I’m most interested in: how we connect the intelligence we can buy to the knowledge inside a business, and use it to make better decisions.
The craft
It’s also why I think forward deployment matters.
The term can sound more complicated than the idea. You get close to a business, spend time with the people doing the work, understand what they need, and build with them.
You notice the spreadsheet someone updates every morning. You ask why a seemingly simple decision takes three meetings. You learn which information people trust and which numbers they always double-check.
Those details shape what you build.
Sometimes that will be a custom agent that can pull information together, investigate a question, and help someone decide what to do. Sometimes it will be a simpler piece of automation. The useful skill is knowing what the situation calls for, then making it work well enough that people choose to use it.
I believe this is going to become a much more valuable ability.
As models improve, more companies will have access to extraordinary intelligence. They’ll still need people who understand their business well enough to put that intelligence to good use. And they’ll need to keep learning from what happens when those systems meet real work.
The place
That’s what I want forwarddeploy.fyi to help with.
If you’re building or running a company, I want this to be a place where you can understand what’s possible, find a sensible place to start, and learn what it takes to make these systems useful for your team.
If you want to grow into this kind of role, I want you to have a place to learn the craft: understanding a business problem, working with its data, building something, testing it, and improving it with the people who use it.
We’ll share open-source frameworks, guides, videos, working examples, and lessons from things that don’t go as planned. We’ll point to good work from other people and contribute what we learn ourselves.
There’s still a lot to figure out. I want us to do that openly, and make it easier for the next company or person to get started.
That’s why I’m building forwarddeploy.fyi.