How to evaluate FDE vendors: A due diligence checklist

A finance CTO had me review three vendor proposals and ask which to pick. All three looked professional, the architecture diagrams were better drawn than ours, and each vision slide promised to be an 'end-to-end AI transformation partner.' When I got to the last page, none of them had what actually mattered: how many projects they'd launched or how many people were using them after launch.

That's the problem with vendor evaluation: you think you're buying a system your employees will use. You're buying a pitch.

FDE, Forward-Deployed Engineering, has never been about connecting models or running beautiful demos. It's about getting engineers on-site, carrying AI through to production, and having people actually use it. Vendor evaluation comes down to two metrics: how many projects went live and what the adoption rate was afterward. Vision can come later. Numbers first.

Why you should focus on numbers, not vision

In demo environments, data is clean, problems cherry-picked, processes smooth. Production isn't. Real knowledge bases have garbage data, contradictory documents, SharePoint sites nobody maintains. Real users are busy. They'll try your tool for three days, then go back to their old process, especially if yours is two seconds slower or gets something wrong once in front of their boss.

We took over a project once. The previous vendor had delivered an AI customer service platform. The demo was excellent, everyone agreed, they signed fast. When I went on-site and measured actual usage: 4%. The system worked fine, it was just designed for 'typical' customers, and this company was nothing like typical. That gap? The vision deck never shows it. Only the project counts and adoption rates do.

That's the principle: whenever a vendor starts talking vision, ask for numbers instead.

FDE vendor evaluation: Due diligence questions

Go through these questions with each vendor. What matters isn't polish, it's whether they'll provide numbers and how specific they can be.

How to read their answers

A good FDE vendor won't panic when you ask about 90-day adoption rates. They'll ask back: who are your target users, what's your current process, how do you measure success? They've done this before. They know adoption is designed, not automatic after launch.

If they respond to questions about numbers with talk of tech stacks, cutting-edge models, and partnership certifications, that's a signal: they're selling the feeling of capability, not deployment results. Anyone can memorize a tech stack. Adoption rates don't.

One more thing people overlook: who actually shows up. Many vendors send their best architect to pitch, then swap in junior staff once you sign. Get names and on-site day counts. FDE's value lives in boots on the ground. When that team rotates, the value walks out the door.

What vendors won't say outright

First: saying you've worked with major clients isn't the same as those systems still running. Deployment and adoption are different. Ask about them separately.

Second: satisfaction scores aren't adoption rates. Satisfaction comes from surveys. Adoption comes from logs. One can be shaped. The other can't.

Third: agree on what 'live' means first. Some vendors count UAT as live. Others mean real business workflows running daily. A definition gap can derail the entire project.

At Tenten, when clients ask these questions, we answer them. We'd rather walk through the specifics, how long adoption took, where we hit friction, what changed, than present another vision slide. Because what matters is straightforward: beautiful demos don't count. Real usage does.