"Forward-deployed" gets thrown around a lot in AI circles right now, usually as a synonym for "we send an engineer on-site." That's part of it, but not the point.
The point is where the model actually runs its first real test — inside your invoicing queue, your customs paperwork, your warehouse floor — not in a slide deck, not in a sandboxed demo environment.
At ZMC we build the smallest possible version of the system first, wire it into one real workflow, and let the edge cases — the ones no one thought to mention in the kickoff meeting — surface early, while they're still cheap to fix.
That's the whole philosophy: less roadmap, more running code, closer to the floor.