What FDEs Own After the AI Demo Works

What happens when an AI demo works perfectly—until a real user uploads a 100-page document and the application crashes? In this episode of FDE Talks, I sit down with Akshay to discuss what Forward Deployed Engineering looks like beyond the demo. Akshay shares lessons from his transition from software engineering into customer-facing AI work, including an experience from Microsoft where a document-processing application worked with the team's test cases but failed when broader users started pushing the system in unexpected ways. That story opens up a bigger conversation about what it takes to move AI from a promising prototype into something customers can actually rely on. We discuss: • How FDEs discover the real customer problem before building • Why customer requirements are often incomplete at the first meeting • Where AI coding tools actually save FDEs time • Why that saved time should go back into understanding the customer • The difference between testing whether an application runs and whether its output is correct • How to turn assumptions about system behavior into explicit evaluations • The role FDEs play between customers, engineering, and product teams • How aspiring FDEs can demonstrate production judgment without years of enterprise experience • A practical five-step approach for taking a small AI application from demo to real-user testing One idea I kept coming back to: *The team had considered what might happen. They had not verified what actually happened.* As AI makes prototypes dramatically faster to build, the ability to test real behavior, understand failure modes, and measure customer value becomes even more important. That is where a lot of the real FDE work begins. --- About FDE Talks FDE Talks is a series from The AI Runtime exploring how Forward Deployed Engineers, AI engineers, solution architects, and customer-facing builders take AI systems from demos to production. If you're building production AI systems—or trying to break into Forward Deployed Engineering—subscribe for more conversations with people doing the work. The AI Runtime: theairuntime.com Subscribe to the channel for more FDE Talks and practical lessons on production AI. #ForwardDeployedEngineer #FDE #ArtificialIntelligence #AIEngineering #ProductionAI #GenerativeAI #LLMOps #