It’s budget season, and the AI requests are already on your desk: more tool licenses, prompt-writing workshops, an AI learning platform. At the same time, the budget you’re dividing is getting smaller. SHRM’s 2026 L&D benchmarking found the median organization spent $299 on L&D per full-time employee, down from $414 in 2025, even as training […]
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Why AI Pilots Stall — and Whose Job It Is to Fix Them
The demo worked. The pilot hit its numbers. The steering committee approved the next phase. Six months later, it’s still a pilot, and nobody can quite say why. If you run a PMO, you’ve probably watched this happen more than once. Pilot purgatory is the most common outcome in enterprise AI, and it rarely traces […]
Build, Buy, or Rent: What AI Deployment Talent Really Costs
Every AI budget eventually reaches the same line item. The model is licensed, the vendor is signed and the pilot is approved. What’s missing is a person who is accountable for carrying it into production, inside your data, your workflows and your compliance rules. There are three ways to get that person. You can buy […]
The FDE Leaves: Who Owns Your AI After Go-Live?
Go-live day goes well. The forward deployed engineer walks the sponsor through the system, leadership thanks the team, and two weeks later the vendor’s people roll off to their next customer. Three months after that, the AI’s answers start drifting. A vendor update changes how a feature behaves. A second business unit wants in. And […]
What Is a Forward Deployed Engineer? A Guide for HR, L&D and PMO Leaders
If your organization is buying enterprise AI in 2026, a vendor has probably offered you a forward deployed engineer, or will soon. The title sounds like an engineering detail. It isn’t. An FDE sits inside your organization, shapes how your teams work with a new AI system, and then leaves when the engagement ends. That […]