May 11, 2026

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THIS WEEK'S EDITION

OpenAI And Anthropic Want To Send Their Own Engineers To Your Office

Last week, news broke that Anthropic and OpenAI are raising enormous sums of money to build out something most people in public affairs have never heard of: Forward Deployment Engineering teams. It's a Silicon Valley term for engineers who don't sit at headquarters writing code. They embed in your offices and make the AI actually run inside your organization. The fact that the world's two most important AI labs are pouring resources into building these teams is one of the most revealing business decisions of the AI era. In today's short read, we break down what it means for public affairs.

Adoption Is The Bottleneck

Throughout the economy, the AI bottleneck is becoming increasingly clear. Technical progress is not the issue. There is now vastly more AI product on the market than any organization can realistically implement. New models, new agents, new specialized tools launch literally every week.  

That firehose of product has a side effect: even leaders who want to deploy AI are drowning in choices. Anthropic and OpenAI realized that if they want their tools used at the speed they're being built, they cannot wait for organizations to figure it out alone. They have to send engineers.

The Five Barriers To Adoption

Behind nearly every stalled AI rollout, you'll find some combination of these obstacles:

🔱 Workflow integration. The model is brilliant. But it doesn't plug into the systems your team uses every day. Without integration, AI lives in a chat window and dies there.

🔱 The skills gap. Most teams have not been trained to prompt, evaluate, or supervise AI work. Buying licenses is not enough.

🔱 Pilot purgatory. Organizations run a flashy proof-of-concept, declare victory in a board deck, and never scale it. The pilot becomes the deliverable.

🔱 ROI ambiguity. Leaders keep asking, "What's the return?" Without a measurement framework, AI investment looks like a cost center instead of a force multiplier.

🔱 Change management. People do not love being told their job is about to change. Without leadership making AI a priority—not a side experiment—it stalls.

The Widening Gulf

This is where two very different camps are forming, and the gulf between them is widening every week:

🔱 The Deployers. These organizations are picking tools and integrating them now—sometimes with help from forward-deployed engineers, sometimes with AI-native vendors, sometimes by rolling up their sleeves internally. They are learning by doing. They are making mistakes. They are taking ground.

🔱 The Waiters. These organizations are running RFPs, standing up steering committees, "evaluating the landscape," and holding out for the big consulting firms to arrive with a tidy 200-slide roadmap. Their AI strategy is, fundamentally, to wait.

By the time the Waiters' consultants finish their assessments, the Deployers will have rebuilt entire workflows. They will have a year of operational experience, a refined tool stack, and a team that knows how to work with AI. The Waiters will be holding a deck.

What This Means For Public Affairs

Public affairs has historically been a Waiter sector. It moves slowly on technology. It defers to legacy vendors. It treats new tools as a risk rather than as an advantage.

That posture was manageable when the technology curve was gradual. It does not work now. The OpenAI and Anthropic investments are highlighting the gulf between the Deployers and the Waiters. Being a Waiter is no longer a strategy that public affairs organizations can afford.

Three Ways To Operationalize This Email

🔱 Audit your AI tool stack today. Not next quarter. Not after the steering committee. List every AI tool your organization is actually using and the workflows each one supports. If the list is short, that's not a problem to study—it's a problem to solve this month.

🔱 Pick one workflow and deploy something against it now. The Deployers learn by deploying. There is no other way.

🔱 Stop waiting for the consultants. They will arrive with valuable advice and large invoices—six months from now, after your competitors are already operational. Speed of execution is now your most important competitive advantage.

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