How do you come up with agent building ideas if you don't have the luxury of FDEs sitting next to your subject matters experts?

Uber popularized the agentic pods concept where forward deployed engineers (FDEs) shadow your business experts and they build AI agents together.

But this is a luxury. Most brands don't have AI-proficient engineers available to shadow domain experts for days. They might have no engineers at all, or one or two who are busy with Shopify stuff. Their employees are busy too, so agent-building opportunities often only get discovered by luck or happenstance.

But you can engineer that process.

A more approachable version of having FDEs sitting next to your team is to capture the work your employees are already doing.

Record someone doing their job for an hour or two. Have them explain what they are doing while they do it. The recording and transcript become the input into Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever tool you use.

Then ask it: find agent automation opportunities in the things that are being done manually.

I have done this with training videos from brands. I take the training video and transcript, look at the manual process, and can get eight things to automate out of it.

Before AI, I used recorded videos to show people I hired how I did a task. They would watch it, learn it, and take the work over. Eventually, that turns into an SOP.

Now those same SOPs, training videos, recordings, and transcripts can become inputs for agent-building ideas. It is the caveman’s version of having 30 FDEs sitting next to you.

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