The Problem Is Your Implementation, Not Your Idea

If your company’s AI transformation is stuck in the deployment gap, Anthropic and OpenAI have a simple message for you:

You’re doing it wrong.

By now it’s no secret that AI has broadly struggled to deliver commercial value commensurate to the cost incurred by companies hoping to adopt it. This is a status quo the top frontier model providers obviously couldn’t accept — and they’ve responded by identifying that the problem was no longer the models themselves, but that enterprise clients most often do not have deep technical AI expertise in-house, leading to failed implementations or projects that never leave the planning phase.

Anthropic and OpenAI have made nine- and ten-figure investments in spinning up forward deployed engineer (FDE) services for clients in the verticals they’re targeting. This model has not been common in software, but the two giants have arrived at the understanding that their businesses are at a critical juncture — and that seizing the moment means solving their clients’ custom implementation problems directly.

In other words: the problem is not your idea. It’s your implementation.

But What If You’re Not a Big Enterprise Client?

Fortunately, the arrival of these FDE services implies that a mature AI technological skillset will become increasingly available over the next several years. Changes already underway in the software industry are pushing engineers to re-skill to seize opportunity of their own in this new landscape.

What this means for you is two things:

Don’t sit on your AI plans any longer. The space is evolving so quickly that you should assume as a default case that the workflows you wish to enhance with AI automation will be achievable by the time you’ve finished the planning phase — if not, you’ve got a plan ready to execute when circumstances change, likely sooner than later.
If you don’t know where to start, start thinking in terms of outcomes. Push yourself a little bit here — pie-in-the-sky wish-listing is genuinely useful as a delimiting exercise and will help you think creatively about how to reach your goals when implementation time arrives.

The Opportunity in Scarcity

For the moment, this is a frontier for most organizations — but that also implies an opportunity. Deep AI technical expertise is a currently scarce resource, but it does exist. You can seize outsize reward for being among the early ones to wrangle AI automation in your space.

The deployment gap is real, but it’s closing fast. The question is whether your organization will be on the right side of it when it does.

Further reading: Anthropic’s consulting push into financial services via Fortune