A validation step that confirms output, action, or data access complies with customer policy or product rules before the workflow continues.

Aka FDE. An individual who helps an org get the most out of AI capabilities by rapidly converting discovered intelligence patterns into software. For AI tools, they identify where that org uses intelligence and delivers on the AI promise.

An FDE
(1) audits to see how to rebuild from the ground up around a particular product or AI;
(2) sets up evaluations to make sure the automation/AI-use will be at least as good as humans; and
(3) deploy that so the systems are real and stay good.

To do this, the FDE is at the intersection of communication, intelligence, product, engineering, and AI. They effectively apply diplomatic pragmatism, effectively selling what they are doing based on their ability to scrutinize and quickly identify, create, deliver, and articulate the value they deliver.

A record of which tools an agent called, with inputs, outputs, timing, and errors — the primary debugging artifact for agentic workflows.

A post-sale technical owner who keeps a deployment healthy, useful, and expanding — handling adoption issues, configuration, and customer-side coordination after the initial FDE builds the thing.

A control that limits what an agent can see, say, decide, or do, which is enforced through policy, permissions, validation, or runtime checks.

A technical customer-facing engineer who maps the customer's problem to a product solution, supporting demos, architecture, proof of value, and deployment planning. Typically pre-sale or early deployment.

The test infrastructure used to run model or agent evaluations repeatedly against examples, expected behavior, tools, and scoring logic. FDEs add real failure cases from production.

A sales operator. Any person in the spectrum of business growth role (e.g., from business development associate to president) who does not deliver client success directly, but instead is focused on growing the business of their firm (e.g., by finding and nurturing relationships with people whose needs they understand how to help). In this sense, the role is technically non-technical.

Connecting a deployment to customer or cloud network resources through a controlled virtual private cloud — typically needed when the agent must reach internal APIs not exposed to the internet.

An application where AI agents perform meaningful workflow steps through tools, context, and controls (not just generating text for a user to copy somewhere else).