Nobody Wanted Your Weird Workflows. Now Everyone Does.
AI made the unsolvable layer of your business buildable. The fight now is over who owns what gets built.
I have lost count of how many times I have seen a company pay a services partner to add a field to their ERP. One column of data with a label on it, quoted at a price that would make a freelance developer blush, and treated by everyone involved as normal. In that world, it was normal.
Swap the ERP for any system an enterprise runs on and the story holds. Accounting packages, HR platforms, CRMs, ticketing systems. I have seen versions of that quote in most of them, and if you work anywhere near enterprise software, so have you.
It took me a while to understand that the quote was rational. It was the visible edge of an economic structure that has shaped enterprise software for three decades, and that structure is the reason the FDE role exists at all.
The economy of the gap
Off-the-shelf software covers the part of your business that generalises. Call it 70%. Payroll runs roughly the same way everywhere, so a vendor can build payroll once and sell it ten thousand times.
The remaining 30% is where your company is actually different. The approval chain that exists because of something that went wrong in 2016. The pricing logic that lives in a spreadsheet because no system could hold it. The Tuesday-morning export that one person runs by hand because two tools refuse to talk to each other.
Vendors never built that layer, and their refusal was the business model working as designed. One company’s weird workflow doesn’t scale, so it doesn’t get built. What filled the gap instead was a Frankenstein arrangement of the software you bought, the people patching around it, and the workarounds everyone stopped noticing years ago.
Around that arrangement grew an entire secondary economy. In ERP, software licensing represents only 20 to 30% of total cost; the rest is the everything-around-the-software. Implementation services typically run one to four times the annual licence fees. A Panorama Consulting survey found that only 7% of companies use their ERP as-is. The other 93% pay someone, at consultancy rates, over months, to bend the general tool towards their specific reality.
And the arrangement renews itself. Customisations sit so deep in these systems that every upgrade risks breaking them, which means every upgrade cycle re-bills the same work, which means the partner who understands your customisations becomes impossible to leave. You don’t pay for the field once. You pay for it forever.
The scale of this is easiest to see in a number that gets published as a triumph. IDC’s most recent Salesforce Economy study found that the partner ecosystem generated $6.19 for every $1 Salesforce earned, a multiplier projected to reach $6.84 by 2028. Read from the vendor’s chair, that is a thriving ecosystem. Read from the customer’s chair, it says that for every dollar of software you buy, more than six dollars of gap exist around it. And the projection has the gap growing.
For thirty years, that was simply what software cost. The weird 30% was never worth solving properly. Too small for a consultancy to build rather than bill, too specific for a vendor, too far down the internal roadmap to ever reach the top. So it stayed patched, and an industry got paid to maintain the patches.
Buildable, ownable, contested
What AI actually changed is the arithmetic on exactly that layer.
The cost of building bespoke software collapsed. Work that needed a team and a quarter now needs one person and a fortnight, sometimes an afternoon. Which means an enormous backlog of problems that were real but never valuable enough to solve has cleared the feasibility bar, all at once, across every company simultaneously.
Enterprises can see this happening and mostly cannot respond with headcount. By the time an internal AI department is scoped, hired and trained, the frontier has moved twice. Renting the capability from people who live at the frontier became the rational move, and the FDE is what that renting looks like. The role exists because the newly feasible needs a delivery mechanism.
But here is the part I find more interesting than the productivity story. Anything that becomes buildable becomes ownable. And anything ownable gets contested.
For thirty years, nobody fought over the bespoke layer because it was worthless as an asset. It was overhead, owned by nobody, living in operators’ heads and hand-run exports. The closest thing it had to an owner was the services partner, and even they only held the slice that touched the tool they serviced. Nobody held the whole workflow, and the fragment the partner did understand was precisely what locked you in.
Now that the layer can be built as real software, the question of who owns what gets built has an answer worth fighting for. And everyone has noticed at once.
The vendor pods build it and the vendor owns it. You get the outcome, they keep the asset, and the learning feeds a product that can eventually be sold to anyone, including the company you compete with. That anxiety is no longer hypothetical: TechCrunch reported last week that enterprises across insurance, fintech and healthcare are hiring their own FDE teams specifically to keep proprietary process knowledge away from the AI firms, on the theory that whoever holds your operational logic can one day compete with you.
The big consultancies have joined by renaming. The same billing model that maintained the patches now arrives wearing an FDE badge.
Enterprises themselves are standing up internal teams, and the job titles give the game away. Datasite is hiring Forward Deployed Engineers inside a Transformation Office, and “transformation engineer” is starting to circulate as a title of its own. When a role gets named after the outcome rather than the position, you learn what the buyer thinks they are purchasing.
And independent practitioners build the layer and hand it over, which is the model I have argued for since Hand Them the Keys.
Four claimants, one layer. This is also, I think, the real story behind the money. The billions committed to forward deployment this summer, the dedicated organisations announced weeks apart, make a strange kind of sense once you stop reading them as spending on deployment assistance. They are bids to own the bespoke layer of the economy. Land that sat unclaimed for thirty years because it was worthless is suddenly the most valuable real estate in enterprise software, and the fences are going up.
The vendors will happily absorb the maintenance cost of your bespoke layer, the way Google happily absorbs the cost of your inbox. The old economy charged you services fees for your weird workflows. The new one may charge you the workflows themselves.
Who should own it
The obvious objection is that all of this is services with a fashionable new title. I take the objection seriously, and I think the ownership question itself is what answers it. The services economy never forced you to ask who owns the bespoke layer, because the layer was a pile of workarounds that nobody would want. The fact that the question now has stakes is the proof that something structural changed.
So, where should ownership land? I don’t think there is one answer, and I distrust the people who have one. I think there is a decision rule.
If the workflow is commodity, let whoever builds it own it. Your expense approval chain is not your competitive advantage. If a vendor’s FDE can delete the workaround and you get the outcome, that is a good trade, and insisting on owning the result is sentimentality dressed up as strategy.
If the workflow is your differentiation, the reason you win deals or hold margins that competitors don’t, then the calculation inverts. Extracting that logic and building it is exactly what a good FDE does, and it is exactly why you should think hard about whose FDE does it. Handing a vendor the extraction means handing them your edge in a form that can be productised. It would be the most expensive field you ever paid for.
The problem is that most organisations have never sorted their workflows into those two piles, because for thirty years the sorting didn’t matter. The whole layer was unsolvable, so it was all just cost.
It matters now. The defaults are being written into contracts this quarter, while everyone stares at the salary numbers, and terms have a way of calcifying long before anyone intended them to be permanent.
So before the next pod arrives with a statement of work, it is worth asking the question the last thirty years never made you ask. Which of your weird workflows would hurt if your competitor could buy them?