Renting Back Your Own Business Logic: Who Owns What Your FDEs Learn?
Complex AI software rarely sells, or sticks, on its own. The pilots that convert are the ones where an engineer sat with the customer and shaped the product to their problem. The hard part is doing that on purpose without turning into a staffing shop.
That engineer learns a lot on site. How your workflows actually run. Where the edge cases live. Which rules nobody wrote down. None of it ends up in the repo.
Vendors are turning that knowledge into reusable templates. Customers risk paying to rent their own business logic back. What gets left behind has to be designed on day one.
Aater Suleman, co-founder of Vixul, has built and sold an AWS services firm and now helps SaaS and services companies stand up forward-deployed engineering functions. He'll walk through what FDEs really produce, who should own it, and what to agree on before the engagement starts.
Hosted by Austen Allred, CEO of Gauntlet AI, the conversation will also get into:
Is the FDE a permanent fixture of enterprise AI, or a sign the tooling isn't finished?
If AI makes a deployment five times faster, what does the client actually pay for?
What would you need to see to trust an engineer in front of your customer on day one?
Speakers
Aater Suleman, Co-founder, Vixul Aater co-founded Vixul, a platform that helps SaaS and services companies stand up and run forward deployed engineering functions. He was previously founder and CEO of Flux7, an AWS services firm acquired by NTT DATA. He taught computer engineering at UT Austin and holds a PhD in Computer Engineering.
Austen Allred, Founder and CEO, Gauntlet AI Austen is the founder and CEO of Gauntlet AI, where elite engineers spend ten weeks rebuilding how they ship software in the AI era and graduate into $200K–$950K roles funded by hiring partners. He previously founded and scaled a technical education company that trained more than 10,000 engineers.
Tuesday, October 27, 1:00 PM CT Gauntlet HQ, Austin Happening during Austin Tech Week