When they leave, who runs it?

When the engineers who built your AI agents go home, who runs them?

Gartner predicts that by 2028, 70% of enterprises will abandon agentic AI built by vendor forward-deployed engineers, trapped by soaring costs and unable to evolve it on their own.

So what? With respect to Gartner, this is stating the obvious. It is the same question I keep asking, which is when the consultant goes, who takes over? Forward-deployed engineering is just a new name for outsourcing the effort to somebody else, and of course if you rely on them, they leave and you haven't built the capability internally, it's not going to work.

I deliver with clients this way myself, and owned outcomes beat handed-over recommendations, so this isn't an argument against the model. It's an argument for sorting the basics before you sign: who from your side is part of that team, how you are building the skills in your organisation while the work happens, and what you are going to do when they go.