Nobody Owns Your Data Problem. That's the Problem.
Most companies don't have a data problem. They have a "nobody owns this" problem.
"Forward Deployed Engineers eat pain and excrete product."
— Shyam Sankar, CTO, Palantir
Most companies do not really have a data problem. They have a "nobody owns this" problem. HubSpot says one number, the finance sheet says another, and "customer" means three different things depending on who you ask. Everyone can see it and nobody's whole job is to clean it up, so it stays a mess. Then you bolt on another AI tool and it just automates the confusion faster.
We have borrowed the Forward Deployed Engineer concept and created our own version: the Forward Deployed Expert (FDE). This ownership gap is what a Forward Deployed Expert closes.
The Chief AI Officer you don't have to hire
A Forward Deployed Expert is someone we put inside your business. Not an implementation person who vanishes after onboarding, but someone close enough to how you actually run your business to see what is broken underneath, and then fix it.
Put plainly: they eat the pain and hand back value. They take the spreadsheet workarounds and turn them into working systems. They decide which process is worth automating next, turn a vague need ("I wish I could see churn coming") into a concrete workflow with real definitions behind it, and then they build it. Advice and execution from the same person.
Think of it as a Chief AI seat for hire: someone who decides where AI belongs in your business, and also has the hands and skills to make it work.
Root systems, not pretty workflows on sand
What separates an FDE from someone who just wires automations is that they will not build on a broken foundation.
If your churn visibility is bad because "customer" isn't defined consistently across HubSpot and billing, an FDE doesn't paper over it with a dashboard, but fixes the definition. They align the systems, reconcile the records, get everyone counting the same thing, and then build the churn view on top of data you can actually trust.
Surface workflows sit on root systems. Fix the root, and every workflow above it suddenly works. Skip it, and you've built a very fast way to be wrong.
Most tools quietly hand that unglamorous part back to you: "you'll need to clean up your data first." An FDE is the person who does that part.
Who owns the transformation
The real value is not one automation. It is that someone finally owns the thread from "our data is a mess" to "here is what changed and what it's worth." Across systems, definitions, and priorities. So this stops being a project nobody has time to lead and becomes something that is actually happening.
You could hire for this. A data engineer, a RevOps lead, an AI strategist, and someone to make them agree. Most growing companies cannot staff all four. An FDE is that role, embedded, without the org chart.
If your data is a mess and nobody owns fixing it, come see what we built at datafabriq.co.