Your company knows something no AI vendor can supply

Your company knows something no AI vendor can supply.

The opportunity is to bring that knowledge and frontier technology together.

Several developments this week are worth reading together:

• Gartner analysts questioned whether frontier AI vendors are ready for enterprise demands.
• Anthropic and Schwab announced tools that bring Claude into financial advisors’ existing workflows.
• Kevin Ampeh highlighted Lawhive’s move from selling AI software to operating legal services itself.

Together, they show why this matters: AI is becoming part of how services are delivered, and in some cases, who delivers them. Companies need to decide how to combine these capabilities with their own knowledge, judgment and responsibility for the work.

For established businesses, customer relationships, operational knowledge and accumulated judgment are valuable starting points. Turning them into better ways of working takes deliberate effort. Best practices can help, but they cannot capture everything that makes a company effective.

Earlier this week, I wrote about this from another lens: how to make it happen.

The Forward Deployed Engineering model I believe in brings specialised AI experience alongside the people who know the business. They build together, improving the work while developing the internal capability to operate and evolve the solution.

That is why these developments matter. As technology moves closer to the work, companies need to get better at bringing their own knowledge into it.

Related reading, including Kevin’s post and my earlier FDE post, in the comments.