I’ve spent the last several posts diagnosing the problem. Staff aug in a hoodie. The certification trap. Engagement models built for a world that’s disappearing.

Now let me show you what winning looks like.

The professional services firms that dominate the next decade won’t be the ones with the most AI-certified consultants. They’ll be the ones who figured out a fundamentally different delivery model — one that sells outcomes instead of hours, arrives with platforms instead of just people, and treats the client as a partner instead of a buyer.

I call it the Forward Deployed Engineering model. And if you’re running a PS firm, this is what you should be building toward.

The Core Shift

Let me start with what this isn’t.

It’s not sending smart people to sit in a client’s environment and figure things out. It’s not billing hours while your team learns the client’s systems and builds infrastructure from scratch. It’s not estimating technical complexity behind closed doors and hoping the project lands somewhere near scope.

That’s the old model. It worked when the value proposition was access to talent. Clients couldn’t hire fast enough, so they rented your people. The arbitrage was simple: you had developers, they needed developers, everyone got paid.

That arbitrage is collapsing. Clients can amplify their own teams with AI tools. They don’t need as many outside developers. And when they do need help, they’re not looking for bodies — they’re looking for outcomes.

The FDE model is built for that reality.

What an FDE Team Looks Like

An FDE team shows up differently than a traditional consulting engagement.

They arrive with a platform.

Not a blank laptop and a Confluence login. A platform. Pre-built accelerators. Proven architectures. Deployment pipelines. Evaluation frameworks. Infrastructure-as-code that’s been tested across multiple client environments.

The platform isn’t the product you’re selling. It’s the delivery advantage that lets you generate value in weeks instead of months. Your team isn’t spending the first eight weeks setting up infrastructure and arguing about tooling. They’re configuring and customizing something that already works.

This is the part most PS firms skip. They think the differentiator is the people. It’s not. The differentiator is that your people show up with leverage — tools and frameworks that multiply their impact from day one.

They run use case discovery with the client.

Instead of taking requirements and disappearing to estimate, the FDE team facilitates a structured discovery process. What are the highest-value use cases? What does success look like for each one? What’s the business impact if we get this right?

The client isn’t handing over a spec and waiting for a number. They’re in the room, prioritizing, making tradeoffs, understanding what’s realistic. They have ownership of the roadmap because they helped build it.

This mirrors exactly what we did with Agile teams in 2012 — estimating with the client using story points instead of calculating technical complexity in isolation. The AI version is use case discovery: collaborative, transparent, focused on business value rather than technical effort.

They deliver in short cycles with visible outcomes.

No disappearing for six months and emerging with a “solution.” The FDE model delivers working capabilities every few weeks. The client can see progress. They can touch it, test it, react to it. They can reprioritize based on what they learn.

This is where the platform investment pays off. Because you’re not building infrastructure while the clock runs, you can show real outcomes fast. First use case in production in four weeks, not four months. That changes the entire client relationship.

They measure outcomes, not effort.

Hours billed is not the metric. Neither is “milestones achieved” or “deliverables completed.”

The FDE model measures what the client actually cares about: use cases deployed, business value realized, adoption achieved. If the engagement succeeds, everyone can point to concrete outcomes. If it struggles, you know early and can course-correct.

This requires a different commercial model. You’re not billing T&M and hoping utilization stays high. You’re pricing based on value delivered. That’s scarier for firms used to the predictability of hourly billing — but it’s also defensible in ways that rate cards never will be.

The Team Composition

The FDE team isn’t just developers with AI certifications. It’s a deliberately constructed unit:

A use case lead who understands the client’s business domain and can facilitate discovery, prioritize ruthlessly, and translate between technical possibilities and business outcomes.

Platform engineers who know your accelerators inside and out — not generalists learning on the job, but specialists who can configure and extend your platform fast.

An ML/AI architect who can evaluate what’s possible, what’s hype, and what’s actually going to work in the client’s environment. Someone who’s deployed production AI systems, not just built demos. This role matters more than most firms realize — your clients are drowning in POCs that never make it to production. They don’t need another person who can spin up a prototype. They need someone who’s been in the trenches getting AI from “cool demo” to “running in production at 3am and nobody’s getting paged.”

Integration specialists who understand that AI doesn’t exist in isolation — it connects to the client’s data, systems, and workflows. Getting the plumbing right is half the battle.

The team arrives as a unit. They’ve worked together before. They have a shared methodology. The client isn’t paying for your team’s forming and storming phases. They’re getting a delivery capability that’s ready to execute.

Why This Matters Now

McKinsey’s latest State of AI survey paints a clear picture: nearly two-thirds of organizations still haven’t begun scaling AI across the enterprise. Only 7 percent have fully scaled. The rest are stuck — 32 percent experimenting, 30 percent piloting.

That’s your opportunity.

Your clients have demos. They have POCs. What they don’t have is production AI generating real business value. The high performers in McKinsey’s survey — the ones actually seeing EBIT impact — have something in common: they’ve defined processes for validation, redesigned workflows, and scaled across multiple functions. They’re not running science experiments. They’re running production systems.

The firms that can bridge that gap — from pilot to production — will own the next decade of enterprise AI work. That’s what FDE teams do.

The Economics

Here’s why this model wins.

Staff aug economics are brutal. You’re selling hours in a market where clients need fewer hours. You’re competing on rate cards against every other firm with certified consultants. The only lever you have is price, and that lever only goes one direction.

FDE economics are different. You’re not selling hours — you’re selling outcomes. The client isn’t comparing your developers to someone else’s developers. They’re comparing the value you deliver against their alternatives: doing it themselves, hiring a competitor, or not doing it at all.

When you deliver a use case that generates $5M in annual value, the conversation isn’t about your hourly rate. It’s about what that outcome is worth. That’s a different negotiation entirely.

The platform investment also changes your margins. Traditional consulting scales linearly — more revenue requires more people. The FDE model has leverage built in. Your platform, your accelerators, your methodology — they make each engagement more efficient than the last. You’re not just selling time; you’re amortizing your IP across every client.

The Transition

I’m not going to pretend this is easy.

Moving from staff aug to FDE requires investment. You need to build platforms — real ones, not PowerPoint. You need to retrain your sales team to sell outcomes instead of hours. You need to restructure engagements around value delivered rather than time billed. You need to accept that some of your current offerings won’t survive the transition.

This is exactly what we faced in 2012 with Agile. The firms that committed to the new model thrived. The ones that tried to split the difference — selling “Agile developers” while keeping the old engagement model — got squeezed from both sides.

The same thing will happen here. The firms that commit to FDE will pull away. The ones that keep hedging will watch their margins erode until there’s nothing left to protect.

Test It in 2026

Here’s my challenge to PS firm leaders: don’t bet the entire company on a model you haven’t proven. Carve out a P&L.

Take one practice area, one market segment, one willing client. Build a small FDE team with a real platform. Run it as an independent unit with its own P&L. Give it six months to prove the economics.

You’re not transforming the whole firm. You’re running an experiment with actual revenue, actual costs, actual client outcomes. If it works, you’ve got proof and a playbook. If it doesn’t, you’ve learned something valuable without betting the company.

This is how we tested Agile at Magenic. We didn’t wake up one morning and declare the whole company was now Agile. We proved it worked with real clients, real teams, real results. Then we scaled what worked.

The firms that carve out a P&L in 2026 will have answers by 2027. The ones that spend another year debating strategy in committee meetings will still be guessing.

The Window

I’ve said it before: the window is maybe 18 months.

Right now, most PS firms are still figuring out that the old model is broken. They’re running the “certify everyone” playbook and hoping it works. That gives you an opening.

The firms that build real FDE capabilities now — platforms, teams, methodologies, outcome-based commercial models — will have a structural advantage that’s hard to replicate. By the time competitors realize they need to make the same investment, you’ll be two years ahead.

But the window doesn’t stay open forever. Once the market figures out what winning looks like, everyone will try to copy it. The advantage goes to the firms that moved first.

The Choice

If you’re leading a PS firm, you have a choice.

You can keep optimizing the old model. Certify more people. Update your capability decks. Hope that clients keep buying hours even as their own teams get more productive.

Or you can build something different. Invest in platforms. Restructure around outcomes. Deploy FDE teams that arrive ready to deliver value, not ready to learn.

I know which bet I’d make. I made a similar bet in 2012, and it worked.

The question is whether you’ll make it in time.

John Doucette is the founder of The Disruption Brief, where he writes about the AI transformation reshaping IT professional services. With 34 years in the industry — from developer to CTO — he’s focused on helping PS firms navigate disruption before it’s too late. Connect with him on LinkedIn.