OAKLAND, California, August 18, 2026 - KPI Partners, an enterprise AI, data, and analytics consulting firm, today announced the launch of its Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) practice. The practice embeds domain-native engineers inside client teams and holds them accountable for one thing: getting AI into production and creating value the business can measure. With the launch, KPI Partners is committing to build a dedicated pool of 100 FDEs in 8-12 Months. Prashanth Ashwathram (VP- Technology) will lead the practice as Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at KPI Partners.
Most enterprise AI does not fail in the model. It fails in the handoff, the point where a promising pilot meets real systems, real data, and real decisions and stalls. Every handoff between analyst, architect, and engineer is a place where business intent leaks out and momentum dies. KPI Partners built the FDE practice to remove that handoff entirely. Its Forward Deployed Engineers are domain specialists first and engineers second, and they stay on the problem until it ships.
The role reflects where engineering itself is heading. The industry moved from the software engineer who builds applications, to the data engineer who builds pipelines, to the ML and AI engineer who build models and agents. The Forward Deployed Engineer is the next step, an engineer defined not by a technology but by the customer outcome they own from discovery to production. It is a proven pattern, established by companies at the frontier of AI and now brought to enterprise data and AI delivery by KPI Partners.
What makes the KPI Partners model different:
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Domain first, code second: A procurement FDE understands contract cycles and working capital. A supply chain for FDE understands network constraints and demand volatility. A finance FDE understands the close, the forecast, and the numbers financial leadership acts on. This is intentionally a broader profile, where an FDE is not just a technical specialist but also a business consultant, so nothing is lost in translation with the business.
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Depth is productized, not just staffed: Every FDE starts with KPI Partners' agentic accelerators, including ProcureIQ, SalesIQ, and HRIQ, as well as a library of production-ready agents across Databricks, Snowflake, and Azure AI Foundry. Day one begins with a running foundation, not a blank page.
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AI is the force multiplier: FDEs use AI to compress the work, not to replace judgment. Where a traditional engineer writes software line by line, an FDE builds alongside AI, spending their time on the customer's problem, the architecture, and validation rather than the mechanics. It is how one accountable owner covers ground that used to need a full team.
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Accountable to production, not to a deck: A traditional engineer joins at build. An FDE owns the whole journey, from the business question to the governed data foundation to the agent running in production. Paired with the KPI Enterprise AI Lab, the practice moves clients from proof of concept to production in 90 days, measured against finance-validated KPIs.
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They stay for adoption: FDEs own the work through go-live and user adoption, not just delivery, so value shows up in daily workflows rather than in a final report.
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Platform agnostic design: The practice works across clients' existing stacks, including Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS.
In one recent engagement, a Forward Deployed Engineer helped a global life sciences company modernize its HR analytics on a Workday migration, redesigning the target architecture and automating manual workflows so that month-end processing that once took three days now runs in a fraction of the time.
"Enterprise AI has reached the point where the winners operationalize it, not talk about it," said Kusal Swarnakar, Partner & Chief Executive Officer, KPI Partners. "Engineering has evolved from writing code to owning outcomes. Our Forward Deployed Engineers own the problem end to end, from the business question to the governed data foundation to the agent running in production. Anyone can staff a project. We take accountability for the outcome."
"An FDE is not a consultant who hands over a deck and leaves," said Prashanth Ashwathram, Head of Forward Deployed Engineering Practice, KPI Partners. "They live inside the client's world, they know the domain as well as the code, and they stay until the business can see the value. Because our accelerators and AI do the heavy lifting from day one, we bring depth and speed together in the first week, not the promise of it later."
The FDE practice is available to enterprise clients now.
ABOUT KPI PARTNERS
KPI Partners is a global strategic partner helping enterprises redefine what's possible with Enterprise AI, Data, and Analytics. Founded in 2006, KPI Partners brings 20 years of experience and a team of 600+ consultants serving 300+ customers across Retail & CPG, Manufacturing, Financial Services, Life Sciences & Healthcare, High-Tech, Energy & Utilities, and Higher Education.
KPI Partners' capabilities span four core areas: Enterprise AI (Agentic AI, GenAI, and Data Science & ML), Data & BI Services (Data Engineering and Business Intelligence), Platform Modernization (Data Platform Migration, BI Platform Migration, and Cloud FinOps & Governance), and Enterprise Software (Custom App Development and ERP Consulting).
Through its proprietary migration accelerators for BI modernization, data platform migration, pre-built analytics for enterprise ERP systems, and GenAI, KPI Partners helps enterprises modernize faster, smarter, and with less risk.
The company maintains strategic partnerships with Microsoft, Databricks, Snowflake, Anthropic, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle, and is ISO 27001:2022 certified and Great Place to Work® certified for six consecutive years.
For more information, visit www.kpipartners.com.
Media Contact
Nishika Gupta
Senior Marketing Associate, KPI Partners
Email: press@kpipartners.com
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