The Forward Deployed Executive

Most people in AI advisory are selling the same thing. A framework. A workshop. A deck that explains what large language models are and a maturity curve telling you where you sit on it. It generates motion that rarely becomes progress. I do something different, and the difference comes from where I've been.

I lived the model the industry is now scrambling to copy.

I spent six years at Palantir. I joined early — somewhere around employee 75 — and served as Chief of Staff to the President & CTO through the years the company scaled. That's where I lived inside the model everyone is now racing to adopt: forward deployment. You don't ship software and walk away. You send your best people into the customer's hardest problem and they stay until it's solved. They own the outcome rather than the demo.

I saw it from inside the work. I know firsthand the conditions under which the platform created transformative value — and the conditions under which it produced expensive motion.

I wrote the spec. I hired the archetype.

I didn't just operate inside that model. I helped build the engine that produced it. I stood up and led the recruiting function — which means I wrote the spec for what a Forward Deployed Engineer actually is. The temperament. The range. The blend of technical depth and real-world judgment that makes someone effective in the field instead of just smart in a room.

I hired that archetype, over and over. I know it from the inside out because I defined it.

Then I deployed myself.

Then I did the thing most people in my position never do. I left, and I bet on myself the same way I'd bet on the model.

I moved to Atlanta and went looking for the problems you can't see from inside Silicon Valley — the physical-world, unglamorous, margin-thin problems that don't care how elegant your software is. I co-founded Saltbox — co-warehousing and logistics infrastructure — and built it to fourteen locations across ten metros. I wasn't advising from the sidelines. I was in it. P&L. Operations. The daily friction of turning a good idea into a business that actually runs.

I didn't learn forward deployment as a concept and then go sell it. I learned it inside Palantir, then forward-deployed myself into a world as far from a software campus as you can get — and ran the model on my own life. Eighteen years of the same operating system. On other people's missions first. Then my own.

Someone has to be deployed where the strategy is set.

So now, when I work with a leadership team navigating AI, I'm not bringing you a methodology I read about. I deploy with you. I embed with your executive team — not a one-time engagement, but sustained presence through the part where it's genuinely hard. The ambiguous direction. The misaligned incentives. The workflows nobody wants to look at honestly. The human side of change that no tool solves. I sit in it with you until there's shared clarity you can act on. And I build it so the momentum holds after I step back.

What you walk away with is your own: a leadership team that sees the same picture, decisions that had been stuck for months coming unstuck, and a direction you can act on — because the conviction is yours, not mine.

The engineers get deployed to build the systems. Someone has to be deployed at the altitude where the real decisions get made. Forward Deployed Executive is the most accurate name for what I've always done — deploy into the hardest problem and stay until it's solved.

That's what a Forward Deployed Executive engagement is: I embed with your leadership team and stay in the hard part until the direction is clear and yours to act on.

If that's the kind of partner you're looking for, let's start with a conversation.