This is not a how-to manual.
It is also not an ROI story.
This is an exploration of a narrower question: can the Forward-Deployed Engineer mindset be borrowed inside one company to help AI adoption spread across teams that do not share the same habits, tools, or instincts?
An FDE, in the Palantir sense, is an engineer who leaves home, embeds in a customer's shop, and makes the product solve the customer's real problem. A forward mission into another tribe, serving the interests of the tribe they came from. I kept that image in my head for a while, then realized I didn't need a flight. The tribes were already inside my own company.
Different teams. Different tools. Different processes. Different rituals. Teams that share my logo but not my instincts. I'd been trying to reach them the usual way - an email from leadership, a mandate, a "please adopt AI" slide deck. It worked, sometimes. A lot of the time it didn't.
