A new role for designers in the AI era
The idea of the “Forward Deployed Designer” comes directly from how we’ve always worked. As designers, we tend to embed deeply within our clients’ teams, sitting alongside operators, engineers, and leadership to understand how work actually gets done. Over time, we found that this proximity is not just helpful, but essential when building AI products. The term reflects a role we have been practicing for years, one that prioritizes being in the field, working through ambiguity, and shaping solutions in context rather than from a distance.
The Forward Deployed Designer is a model for how AI products should be built and adopted inside organizations. It starts from a simple observation: most enterprise AI fails not because the technology is weak, but because it is introduced without a deep understanding of how people actually work. Despite significant investment, many systems never reach meaningful adoption because they are misaligned with real workflows and user needs.
We consistently worked by embedding directly within client teams, operating close to users, data, and constraints. Over time, this way of working proved to be the most effective way to identify high-leverage opportunities and build solutions that actually get used. The Forward Deployed Designer formalizes this approach as a role. It combines design, engineering, and domain understanding, placing individuals inside organizations to discover problems, prototype solutions, and iterate in real time.
Unlike traditional roles that apply pre-built tools, Forward Deployed Designers build systems around the client from the ground up. They focus on uncovering use cases, shaping products through direct feedback, and ensuring adoption through continuous iteration. The goal is not just to ship software, but to create traction and embed AI into everyday workflows in a way that is durable and repeatable.
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