For enterprise buyers of AI

Don’t have a forward-deployed engineer?

Borrow ours. A fractional forward-deployed engineer (FDE) who evaluates AI technology against your actual systems and takes a proof of concept through to production.

As resident Technology Evangelist in the Salesforce Innovation Centre, Derek spent decades advising enterprise buyers on the best way to fast-track their technology adoption and create value faster. This is that advice, alongside your team.

Sound familiar?

The moment this usually starts

  • An agent platform is bought, and nobody on your side is set up to integrate it.
  • A pilot is stuck between demo and production — it works in the meeting, not yet in the environment.
  • A vendor’s forward-deployed engineer (FDE) left when the deal closed, and the work they were doing didn’t.
  • A business case needs working evidence before the next funding or budget gate, not another slide.

What you get

Evidence, at each stage

Evaluate

The technology assessed against your actual data, security posture and integration reality — in writing, not a vendor deck rephrased.

Proof of concept

Working, in your environment, in weeks — enough to see what holds up before anyone commits further budget.

Production pilot

Live with real users, instrumented, and handed to your team to run. Production stays with the people who will operate it.

Integration

Agents, voice agents, and the systems they have to talk to — the unglamorous plumbing that decides whether a pilot survives contact with production.

We run on it ourselves

Systems we built, not just advised on

The fastest way to trust an evaluation is to see the evaluator’s own systems. These are ours, written up.

Recent work

Prototype to production, with a fractional engineer

An early-stage AI document-assessment startup: prototype to production with a fractional engineer, the founder’s team of four now selling it and a medical vertical opening up. The same fractional-engineer shape serves a startup without a CTO and an enterprise without an FDE.

How engagements are shaped

Proof of concept, or production pilot

Scoped as a proof of concept or a production pilot, with a fractional engineer alongside your team on a quarterly retainer. Production stays with the team who will run it.

Talk to us about your evaluation

Tell us what you’ve bought or are evaluating, and where it’s stuck — and we’ll come back to you quickly. Email hello@helikona.com or message us on Slack.