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The AI and Agentic Frontier (Moving Beyond Chatbots)
In this episode, we dive into Chapter 5 of The Forward Deployed Engineer: Architecting the Last Mile of Enterprise AI by Sho Shimoda [1]. We explore the rapidly shifting technological landscape of enterprise AI and why the skills that produced a competent chatbot in 2023 will produce a brittle, failing deployment in 2026 [2, 3].
We break down the critical shift from passive, conversational chatbots to active, autonomous "agentic" workflows [4]. Because enterprise executives don't want to chat with their data—they want systems that take action—Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) must now master a completely different set of architectural primitives [2, 4].
Tune in as we explore the essential capabilities every FDE must master on the modern AI frontier:
- Multi-Agent Orchestration: Moving away from single large language models to constellations of specialized agents (researchers, writers, reviewers, tool-users), and how to avoid the "cascading-confidence problem" where agents confidently pass bad data down the line [5, 6].
- Evals as a First-Class Discipline: Why evaluations are the new unit tests. We discuss building golden datasets, capturing "weird Tuesday" edge cases, and using adversarial testing to ensure deployments don't go rogue [7-9].
- Adversarial Testing & Red-Teaming: How to defend agentic systems against prompt injection, tool-call abuse, and data exfiltration before the customer's security team ever sees the deployment [10, 11].
- Model-Agnostic Deployments: Why hard-coding your deployment to a single model is a massive mistake, and how to use routing abstractions to manage token costs and strict enterprise latency requirements [12-14].
Finally, we discuss what founders should actually look for when hiring for these skills, including why a candidate's "failure stories" and strong opinions on the AI frontier are their most valuable assets [15, 16].
📚 Get the Book!If you are interested in these contents and would like to know more about mastering the AI and agentic layer for enterprise deployments, please purchase Sho Shimoda's book on Amazon and tell others about it!
Buy it here: The Forward Deployed Engineer on Amazon
Thank you to our listeners for tuning in! Please follow, like, leave comments, and tell your friends to help spread the knowledge of the next era of software engineering.
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By S.SHIMODAIn this episode, we dive into Chapter 5 of The Forward Deployed Engineer: Architecting the Last Mile of Enterprise AI by Sho Shimoda [1]. We explore the rapidly shifting technological landscape of enterprise AI and why the skills that produced a competent chatbot in 2023 will produce a brittle, failing deployment in 2026 [2, 3].
We break down the critical shift from passive, conversational chatbots to active, autonomous "agentic" workflows [4]. Because enterprise executives don't want to chat with their data—they want systems that take action—Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) must now master a completely different set of architectural primitives [2, 4].
Tune in as we explore the essential capabilities every FDE must master on the modern AI frontier:
- Multi-Agent Orchestration: Moving away from single large language models to constellations of specialized agents (researchers, writers, reviewers, tool-users), and how to avoid the "cascading-confidence problem" where agents confidently pass bad data down the line [5, 6].
- Evals as a First-Class Discipline: Why evaluations are the new unit tests. We discuss building golden datasets, capturing "weird Tuesday" edge cases, and using adversarial testing to ensure deployments don't go rogue [7-9].
- Adversarial Testing & Red-Teaming: How to defend agentic systems against prompt injection, tool-call abuse, and data exfiltration before the customer's security team ever sees the deployment [10, 11].
- Model-Agnostic Deployments: Why hard-coding your deployment to a single model is a massive mistake, and how to use routing abstractions to manage token costs and strict enterprise latency requirements [12-14].
Finally, we discuss what founders should actually look for when hiring for these skills, including why a candidate's "failure stories" and strong opinions on the AI frontier are their most valuable assets [15, 16].
📚 Get the Book!If you are interested in these contents and would like to know more about mastering the AI and agentic layer for enterprise deployments, please purchase Sho Shimoda's book on Amazon and tell others about it!
Buy it here: The Forward Deployed Engineer on Amazon
Thank you to our listeners for tuning in! Please follow, like, leave comments, and tell your friends to help spread the knowledge of the next era of software engineering.