About
Meet the moment.
A few times in history, a technology has changed what work is. Electricity did. The computer did. AI is doing it now, and faster than any organization was built to absorb.
Transformations like this are not won in the lab. They are won in the field, one customer at a time, by the forward deployed engineers and applied AI teams who make the technology work inside real businesses. How far AI goes depends on how far their impact can reach.
Forward Co. exists to extend that reach. We build the systems that let each engagement make the next one better, so the people leading this transformation can scale their impact to meet the moment. That is what the name means: forward is what the work does next.
Applied AI field operations · founded 2025
§ 01 · Why the firm exists
The power was never the hard part.
When factories first got electricity, productivity barely moved. Owners bolted electric motors onto plants built around a steam engine and kept the shafts and belts that ran whole rows of machines from a single drive, an arrangement called group drive. The gains the new power promised took four decades to arrive. They came when factories gave each machine its own motor, the unit drive, and rebuilt around it: new floors, new roles, new ways of working. Economists call that work co-invention, and every technology this consequential has needed it.
Paul David, “The Dynamo and the Computer,” American Economic Review 80(2), 1990 · Timothy Bresnahan and Shane Greenstein, “Technical Progress and Co-Invention in Computing and in the Uses of Computers,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity: Microeconomics, 1996 · Bounded analogue: how earlier technologies paid off, not evidence about AI
AI’s co-invention is happening now, inside customer environments. Much of it is being done by the forward deployed engineers and applied AI teams that the labs, the platforms, and now enterprises themselves have built. The need for them is no longer in question. What is in question is scale: how to meet it without hiring in step, and without burning out the people who carry it.
Today, what a deployment teaches tends to stay where it happened: one customer, one artifact, one person’s head. A field organization that runs that way is still on group drive, with every customer belted to what a few engineers know, and it works until demand outgrows them. Talent that good deserves a harness: something that holds what it learns, so the work of a few exceptional people counts for everyone who comes after.
Every deployment should make the next one better.
§ 02 · What the firm does
One system, three returns.
That system has a name. Forward Co. designs and installs Forward Deployed Systems. A Forward Deployed System is the operating model for Applied AI field organizations, designed to produce three measured returns from customer deployment work: customer outcomes, reusable field capability, and governed product signal.
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Customer outcomes
Adoption, not deployment. The deployment is adopted, used in the intended workflow, and produces the agreed operational or financial result. Adoption and utilization are both required; neither alone is the outcome.
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Reusable field capability
The lesson carried forward. What one deployment taught becomes a repeatable motion, so the next one starts where the last finished — what the field calls reusable patterns. The client permits what compounds, in the engagement’s confidentiality and IP terms, before any learning enters the reusable layer.
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Governed product signal
A decision, not a pipeline. Repeated field evidence goes to a recorded decision: productized, retained as reusable field capability, kept local, or not acted upon. Each route is recorded with a named decider, a date, and a reason; a route not acted upon also carries a re-decision clock.
Whether a deployment produces all three is measured, not assumed.
Heroics do not scale. Systems do. We build the system because the heroics deserve to count.
§ 03 · The founder
Where the method came from.
Cory Haldeman founded Forward Co. and designed the operating model it installs. Three seats shaped the method, and most people only ever sit in one.
Carried the mandate.
Holding-company content strategy at a Fortune 100 — standing up the Adobe Content Supply Chain at scale, and buying transformation from McKinsey, Accenture, Publicis, WPP, and Deloitte.
What the seat taught: what an operating owner needs from outside help. Not another set of recommendations; a path through the organization.
Reengineered the value model.
Cloud-level strategy across Experience Cloud and Creative Cloud, and the shift underneath it: from selling features and function to a consultative program that tied board-level objectives to the platforms meant to serve them. Founded Adobe’s management-consulting alliance with McKinsey, BCG, and Bain.
What the seat taught: how a platform’s value becomes legible to a board, and why the coalition around a deployment decides whether it lands.
Advised the room.
Founded the Enterprise Experience Transformation practice — management consulting, systems integration, and brand in one model — working alongside MBB and the global integrators on how enterprises draw value from the platforms they run.
What the seat taught: how outside help can change an operating model and then leave it standing.
Those three seats set how the firm reads a field organization: from the executive outcome backward, from the platform capability outward, and from the operating model underneath both. They are the origin of the method. What stays with the founder is the standard: what the firm publishes, what it claims as evidence, and what it declines to sell.
§ 04 · How the firm works
Three commitments hold the work.
The system belongs to you. It is designed and installed inside your own field organization, with your people, and they run it. A system that needed its designer in the room to keep working would fail the test it was built to pass.
The firm is platform-neutral. It sells no platform of its own, and nothing it installs is tied to a vendor’s ecosystem.
The evidence is labeled. Forward publishes client outcomes only when they satisfy its evidence standard. Every other item is labeled for what it is: illustrative specimen, internal demonstration, bounded analogue, or market context. Today there are no published client outcomes, and saying so is part of the standard.
Forward Co. builds the system a field organization runs; it does not staff it, and the system is an operating model rather than software. Whether it fits is one test, answered on the Method page.
Start with one conversation.
Say where capacity has become the constraint, what the last engagement taught that the next one never received, or where the field is carrying what the product should. One conversation establishes whether a Forward Deployed System fits, and how: building the motion, scaling it, or, if that is the honest answer, neither. Not a pitch, not a deck. You hear back within a day.