I've been an entrepreneur for a little over fifteen years now. Before that, I had an eight-year corporate career, where I cut my teeth learning the fundamentals of business and markets. Over the course of my career, I've advised Fortune 500 giants moving up the rankings, PE-backed companies closing in on a billion dollars in revenue, and startups raising their first priced round.

Which is really just a way of saying that I've seen the game of business played at lots of different levels, from expert to beginner. However, never before have I seen anything like the shift in how organizations operate right now.

Generative AI has made things possible in business that were never possible before. Strategists can design, designers can code, coders can market, and marketers can think like executives. On the surface, this is amazing. But it also creates an existential crisis of sorts. When everyone can do everything, what should they do? What should be prioritized? Also, who decides?

It's clear to me that organizational structures are changing, and so are job descriptions. Some jobs are going away. Others are expanding and subsuming the ones around them. The future is bright, but it's also uncertain, which I suppose is nothing new in business. Everything is always in a constant state of flux. However, the difference this time is that the uncertainty feels structural to me. The shape of the work itself is changing, not just the pace of it.

The Parallel Org Chart

One idea I've been thinking about quite a bit lately is the parallel org chart. The concept is in the name. In an agentic world, every human in your company gets exactly one AI agent—a counterpart that mirrors their role, picks up the tasks they would normally delegate, and operates inside their workflow. One person, one agent. A pairing, if you will.

The result is a second org chart running parallel to your existing one. Your CFO has an agent that thinks in CFO terms. Your head of customer success has one that lives in customer conversations. Your sales reps each have one that prepares for calls, drafts follow-ups, and reads the patterns across deals. It's a way to clone your organization, and, in theory, double your impact.

Whether this comes to fruition for every business is still up for debate, but it's worth thinking about (and experimenting with) because the result could be transformational. You're not making each person ten percent faster. You're giving the organization a second version of itself.The catch is that no one inside most companies today is qualified to actually build a parallel organization.

Which brings us to the role I think you have to hire for first.

The (internal) Forward-Deployed Engineer

The term "forward-deployed engineer" has been around for a while now, but it became a lot more popular in May when OpenAI announced a unit focused on helping organizations build and deploy AI systems they can rely on across their most important work.

Definitions will vary across organizations, but a forward-deployed engineer, or FDE, is a highly technical software or solutions engineer who embeds directly within a client's organization to implement, tailor, and operationalize a company's technology. They solve the "last-mile" integration problems, bridging the gap between a complex product and the messy real-world data and workflows it has to live inside. The model was pioneered by companies like Palantir, where intensity is the defining feature: FDEs don't just deliver a system, they stay until it actually runs.

But that's the external version of the role, and the one most people think of when they hear the term. What I'm actually thinking about for my clients is the inward-facing version: an internal forward-deployed engineer. It’s the same skill set and the same intensity, but deployed inside your own walls, for your own benefit. So maybe it's not forward deployed, per se, maybe it's static, or something else. I’m not entirely sure yet. But it's not someone you ship out to other companies. It's someone you hire to embed inside yours.

Regardless, FDEs, internal or external, operate at the intersection of three distinct skill sets:

1. Software engineering. The ability to write clean, deployable code and debug complex distributed systems.

2. Product strategy. The capability to figure out exactly how to use the technology to drive a measurable business outcome.

3. Customer consulting. High emotional intelligence, communication skills, and executive presence to guide stakeholders and manage expectations.

While this role has its roots in highly technical companies, I think the case for the internal version inside any company is overwhelming. We're rapidly reaching the era where every company should think of itself as a tech company, and I think the internal FDE can take the place of, say, a Chief AI Officer for most companies. Yes, they're hard to find, and yes, you'll pay them a lot of money (maybe $200K to $350K). But these folks could be the key to unlocking the most intelligent version of your organization.

For a sense of what the role looks like in practice, here's what a senior FDE is expected to do at Salesforce (just a few of the responsibilities):

1. Drive tangible outcomes through hands-on implementation.

2. Build transformative and bespoke agentic AI solutions.

3. Own the entire data configuration and integration lifecycle.

4. Conduct deep-dive technical debugging and root cause analysis.

5. Lead rapid prototyping and iteration.

Imagine someone with that skill set doing it inside your company, for your own strategic roadmap. Regardless of what kind of company you work at, I'd bet a lot of money on the fact that you want someone who can do everything on this list. The internal FDE is the role that turns the parallel org chart from a thought experiment into something the company actually puts into play.

Which brings me to the one other role I think you should hire alongside this one.

The Case for Hiring More Writers

Stay with me here.

Everything your business aspires to achieve is downstream of your ability to articulate your story. It doesn't matter if you're trying to convey your goals to your sales team, get buy-in from your board on the shift in your strategic roadmap, or simply trying to close a deal with a customer. The success of each one of those endeavors is directly tied to your ability to articulate what you're doing and why it matters.

What's more, large language models deal in language, and, more interestingly, in predicting what language should be deployed in any given situation. So it's not a crazy idea to think that the people with the most command over language, the ones who have studied storytelling from a first-principles standpoint, would be among the most effective users of large language models.

That said, I don't think you should spin up a job description for a "writer" in the traditional sense. A writer inside an enterprise looks very different from a writer at, say, a newspaper. I think the role could look more like one of these two.

1. The first is the strategy role. A Director of Strategy and Positioning who owns how the company positions itself in its market: what it stands for, who it serves, how it differentiates from its competitors, and the story it tells across every channel where customers, partners, and recruits encounter it. This person works directly with the CEO on positioning architecture and translates strategy into the language that sales leaders, marketing teams, and executives use every day. They represent the company's thinking in industry talks, trade press, customer conversations, and major executive communications. They sit at the executive table and report to the President or CEO.
   
   

2. The second is the voice role. A Director of Voice and Editorial Strategy who owns how that positioning actually shows up in language across the things the company puts in front of the world: customer proposals and capability statements, the website, recruiting materials, executive presentations, board communications, sales enablement content, and thought leadership. The person develops the editorial standards the company uses to keep quality and consistency high across every surface, sharpens flagship customer-facing work, and coaches senior leadership on how to articulate the company's positioning in customer conversations, conference talks, and external speaking. They sit at the executive table and report to the President or CEO.

These are two distinct roles, both executive-table, and both also speak to the companies positioning and strategy on AI. Most companies will start by hiring one of them. The ambitious ones will eventually hire both.

Three Things to Reimagine

I think one of these writer roles, paired with an internal forward-deployed engineer, would give any company a pretty incredible advantage. You'd have someone who can build what AI now makes newly possible, and someone who can make sure the rest of the company, the market, and your customers actually understand why it matters.

In the AI era, you must:

1. Reimagine your role.

2. Reimagine your org chart.

3. Reimagine your story.

Once you've done those three things, you'll have reimagined your future.