When we started Whitetower back in 2014, clients came to us for websites. A few years later the brief changed and everyone wanted “digital transformation.” Get the business online, put in a proper CRM, wire up some dashboards, get off the spreadsheets. It was good work and it was necessary work. But looking back, most of it was really one thing – getting digital. Getting the house in order. That was stage one. And a lot of businesses are still sitting in it. The label has since moved on. The work that used to get sold as digital transformation is increasingly being called Forward Deployment Engineering, and the rename actually means something. The model Palantir built over a decade ago – put an engineer inside the customer’s environment, give them full ownership of the outcome, let them build in the real stack and keep iterating after launch – has gone mainstream. In the last 18 months OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks and a long tail of AI companies have all stood up forward-deployed teams (OpenAI even spun theirs into a named “deployment” group). Job postings for the role grew somewhere north of 700% year on year. It’s no longer a niche title….
