Forward Deployment Engineers, expert consulting, FDE staffing, and the only 8-week training program that turns your people into agentic AI practitioners. 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail. Ours don't.
MIT's NANDA initiative found the culprit: 95% of enterprise AI pilots collapse not because the technology failed -but because no one bridged the gap between what the model can do and what the business actually needs. That bridge has a name: the Forward Deployment Engineer.
of enterprise generative AI pilots show no measurable P&L impact despite $30–40B in global spending
of companies in early AI maturity have implemented zero AI talent strategy. Zero.
of executives say AI is advancing faster than their organization's ability to train for it
demand-to-supply ratio for specialized FDE roles. The talent simply does not exist at scale yet.
We built four service lines that cover every stage of your AI deployment journey -from "we need someone in here today" to "we want our own team trained up and running forever."
Need an expert in the building now, without a 6-month hiring process? We place vetted Forward Deployment Engineers on 3-month to 2-year engagements -ready to ship production AI, not slide decks.
Ready to build permanent capability? We find and evaluate the FDE candidates the big job boards can't. Because we built the curriculum, we know exactly what "good" looks like -and we don't send you anyone who doesn't meet it.
You have an AI team. They need FDE superpowers. Our consulting teams embed alongside yours -attending standups, building on your roadmap, and shipping working production systems. Not 200-page assessments.
The only program that turns your existing employees into production-ready FDE practitioners. Domain expertise + our curriculum = internal capability you own forever. Open enrollment or custom enterprise cohorts.
The name isn't just fun -aardvarks are relentless diggers. So are we. While other firms hand you a roadmap and wave goodbye, our FDEs go underground into your systems, your data, your workflows, and they don't come up until something is working in production.
Every engagement ends with something deployed and in production use by your team -not a slide deck or an assessment document.
Because we built the FDE training program, we know exactly what skills separate deployment success from pilot failure. We use that knowledge in every placement.
Our FDEs are trained in HIPAA, SOC 2, FINRA/SEC data handling, and AI governance. Regulated industries are our specialty, not our exception.
Our service lines feed each other. A consulting engagement today can become a contractor placement, then a recruiting search, then an enterprise education cohort. We grow with you.
Most clients start with contractor placement or consulting, prove ROI, then invest in permanent capability. We're designed to walk with you through every phase.
We focus where the need is most urgent: industries with high AI investment, complex compliance environments, and the widest skills gap. If your sector is on this list, the time to act was yesterday.
Banking, insurance, wealth mgmt. FDE is literally the #1 deployment bottleneck per Anthropic's own initiative.
Providers, payers, life sciences. 85% increasing AI budgets. HIPAA complexity makes generalist firms useless here.
56% adoption rate. The fastest FTE recruiting market. Prime territory for full-time FDE placement.
Legal, accounting, consulting. 77% expect agentic AI central to workflow by 2030 -they just don't have the skills yet.
44% adoption. Large workforces with deep operational expertise -perfect candidates for the education program.
47% adoption. AI deployment is now a competitive necessity for customer experience and supply chain.
Slower procurement, but massive multi-year contracts. The education cohort model has its highest ROI here.
A few examples of how our service lines come together to move enterprises from stalled pilots to production AI.
Dozens of staff across operations, maintenance, and regulatory affairs were already using AI chatbots individually for drafting and research -but nothing was integrated into their actual workflows, and outage reporting, compliance filings, and maintenance logs were still entirely manual.
Ran an enterprise cohort of the 8-week program for a cross-functional group of analysts and engineers, using the utility's own outage, maintenance, and compliance data in the practicum modules. Participants moved from "asking AI questions" to building and owning agentic workflows for their own teams.
18 staff trained now build and maintain their own agentic workflows in-house.
A staffing client's recruiting operations were running on manual, inconsistent workflows -slowing time-to-fill and quietly eroding margins that compound quickly at volume.
Placed a full-time FDE who embedded with the recruiting team, mapped out their end-to-end workflows, identified the bottlenecks, and built AI-assisted tooling directly into how they worked -no rip-and-replace, just meaningful acceleration at the right steps.
Increase in productivity -recruiters took on more work without adding headcount.
Customer service reps were juggling dozens of policy manuals, internal wikis, and procedure documents during live calls -putting customers on hold for minutes at a time just to track down an answer that existed somewhere in the system.
Placed an FDE contractor who spent time on the floor with agents to understand how they actually searched for answers mid-call, then built an AI-powered search tool over the full documentation library connected directly to the agent desktop -surfacing the right answer, with source citations, while the agent is still on the line.
A production tool now used on every call, giving agents answers in seconds instead of minutes of searching and hold time.
From floor observation to a live assist tool used on every call.
Aardvark AI is run by the team behind Crossfire Consulting -three founders with a combined 75+ years of consulting, IT, and staffing experience, now focused entirely on getting enterprises real value from agentic AI.
50+ years across computing, telecommunications, and financial systems, including C-suite roles at publicly traded companies. A stellar trainer who brings deep cross-industry context to every client engagement, from regulated enterprises to fast-moving telcos.
25+ years across project management, development, systems architecture, and QA. A talented FDE in her own right, she leads FDE teams and steadily finds new talent for Aardvark AI to put in the field.
25+ years in IT consulting spanning requirements analysis, project management, and Scrum leadership. Has a knack for mapping out exactly how a business really works -then finding where AI can dig in and make it better.
25 years running Crossfire Consulting. Now all-in on agentic AI deployment.
No public program combines what we do: enterprise deployment practicums, agentic automation, compliance fluency, and business case skills -all wrapped in credentials from Google, Vanderbilt, Microsoft, and IBM.
For career changers and recent grads targeting FDE placement. Enroll individually, get placed with high-visibility companies.
License the program for your internal candidates. Perfect for orgs with strong domain expertise but zero AI deployment capability.
We provide curriculum and instructors. You provide candidates and your own real-world scenario data for the practicum modules.
AI Foundations & Prompt Engineering Mastery
Agentic Workflow Design, AI-Powered Document Search & No-Code Automation
Microsoft Copilot Ecosystem, Enterprise Integration, AI Governance, Compliance & Security
Business Case Development, Change Management & Live Practicum
Graduates are job-ready FDE practitioners in 8 weeks. Not generalists. Not theorists. People who can walk into an enterprise, understand the workflow, and deploy a working AI system.
The models are ready. The budgets are committed. The thing actually blocking your AI deployment is human talent. That's exactly what we are.— Aardvark AI, aard-vark.ai
Whether you need an FDE in the building next month, a permanent hire, a consulting team, or a training program for your whole org -let's talk. No 200-page proposals. Just a conversation about what you actually need.
We typically respond within one business day. We're a fast-moving crew.