What Is a Forward Deployed Agent (FDA)?

What an FDA is, in one paragraph

A Forward Deployed Agent (FDA) is the delivery model Naboo uses to ship a Decision Graph for an enterprise customer in 2-4 weeks. The FDA is not a project manager or a generalist consultant - they are a specialist in ETL, data science, and the customer's particular toolchain. They sit with the customer's tech lead for two to four hours of elicitation, then encode the resulting entity definitions and joins across code, tickets, PRs, Slack, and internal services. The output is a queryable graph exposed via GraphQL and MCP, ready for the customer's agents to call.

The job, week by week

Week 1: elicitation. Sit with the tech lead, walk through ten real questions an engineer asks today, record every implicit reference type (branch-name conventions, flag-key patterns, Slack thread habits). Week 2-3: encoding. Translate the elicited language into typed entities and live-ETL plumbing across the source systems. Week 4: verification. Run a blind benchmark on the ten elicitation questions, iterate the entity definitions until the agent returns the right chain. End of week 4: the GraphQL surface and MCP server are locked; the customer's agents can call against production.

Why this is a role, not a tool

The encoding step requires judgment a tool cannot make. 'What is a feature here, in your words?' has a different answer at every company. A naive automated mapper would either over-generalize (and lose precision) or over-fit (and lose generality). An FDA - a human who has done this twenty times - knows which questions to ask, which patterns transfer, and which to encode as customer-specific. The Decision Graph stops being a generic framework and becomes the customer's actual decision substrate.

FDA vs professional services vs solutions engineering

Professional services typically delivers a configured product within the vendor's existing object model. Solutions engineering supports pre-sale evaluation. A Forward Deployed Agent does the work that lives between: shipping production infrastructure that encodes the customer's specific reality. Palantir originated the model; it's the right shape for any platform whose value depends on capturing a customer's hidden vocabulary.

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