Supply chain planning vendor Kinaxis is rolling out a Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) model, sending its own software specialists to work directly inside client operations and co-build concrete AI use cases. A first cohort of selected customers was picked at the company’s recent Kinexions event.
What Forward Deployed Engineering means
The FDE label is gaining traction as enterprise AI matures. The idea: pair an editor’s engineers with a customer’s teams to design and deploy AI solutions tuned to real operational constraints, blending technical expertise, business consulting and product development in a single engagement. Kinaxis frames it as a way to shorten the gap between analysis and action.
Grounding AI in operational reality
Chief executive Razat Gaurav argued that a supply chain decision only counts if it changes how a company actually behaves. That, he said, calls for AI anchored in day-to-day constraints, dependencies and trade-offs, capable of turning isolated calls into coordinated execution at scale. To support the approach, Kinaxis is extending its Maestro platform with “composable and extensible” capabilities that embed agentic AI straight into operational workflows. A dedicated hackathon is also on the agenda.
The move puts Kinaxis in the same camp as rivals racing to prove agentic AI can run live planning rather than just advise on it. Execution, not recommendation, is becoming the dividing line.
