FDECo announced its launch as a specialist applied AI consultancy built to help organizations move AI from promising prototypes into secure, scalable production systems that deliver measurable business value.

FDECo is built around Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), senior technical builders who work directly inside client environments, combining deep AI engineering capability with the business understanding and delivery ownership required to solve complex, real-world problems.

The business provides organizations with two ways to access that capability. Clients can embed experienced AI Engineers and expert-level FDEs directly into their teams or engage FDECo to take responsibility for complete AI projects, from assessment and use case discovery through architecture, build, evaluation, production and handover. FDECo will also deliver specialist Applied AI training programs to develop the AI capability organizations need.

The launch addresses one of the biggest challenges facing enterprise AI: turning experimentation into production value. More than 80% of AI projects fail, according to research published by RAND Corporation, while Gartner has reported that 59% of AI prototypes never reach production.

The challenge is increasingly less about access to powerful AI models and more about the “agentic harness” around them: the engineering, integrations, controls and infrastructure required to make AI work reliably inside an enterprise. Production AI must operate against real data and systems, respect security and permissions, integrate with existing workflows, remain observable and auditable, perform economically at scale and produce outcomes the business can measure.

“Everyone is an AI expert now. The harder question is who can actually make it work inside a business,” said James Lloyd-Townshend, FDECo CEO. “A prototype can prove that the technology is capable of something. Production requires engineering around the realities of the organization, its data, systems, people, controls and economics. That is the gap FDECo is here to close.”

Unlike traditional consulting models where discovery, architecture, engineering and implementation may pass between different teams, FDECo uses Forward Deployed Engineers to keep technical execution close to the business problem throughout delivery. FDEs embed with client teams to understand how the organization actually operates, translate ambiguous business challenges into technical systems and take responsibility for getting those systems working in production.

FDECo begins with the business outcome rather than a predetermined AI solution, which also means challenging the technology where necessary. A proposed agent may ultimately need a simpler architecture. An apparent AI problem may prove to be a data or process problem. A use case may not have sufficient economics to justify productionization at all.

“If the right answer is not to build it, we will say so,” said Townshend. “Successful applied AI is not about putting as much AI into an organization as possible. It is about identifying where the technology can genuinely change an outcome and engineering the smallest, dependable system capable of delivering it.”