Forward Deployed Consultant; FDC)

Position: Forward Deployed Consultant (FDC)
About the Company
Aistra is an AI transformation and deployment company operating across India, MENA, the UK and Australia. We take clients through all four stages of AI transformation: strategy and roadmap, solution build, production deployment, and operations t firms pick one of those and call it a practice. Delivery runs on 80 assets of registered IP, spanning accelerators, toolkits and codified domain playbooks, carried into engagements by embedded pods rather than sold as a slide pack.

Aistra Talent builds and calibrates that workforce against defined role archetypes and places them directly into client teams. The Forward Deployed Consultant is the archetype that carries the commercial thread. Everything the pod builds has to survive a conversation this person had first.
About the Role
Most AI business cases fall apart in the same room. Not the workshop where the ideas get generated, the meeting where the CFO asks where the number came from. The benefit is a percentage borrowed from a vendor deck, the baseline was never measured, and nobody can name which line of the P&L moves or in which quarter. The programme gets deferred, or funded at a fraction of the ask, and the technology was never the reason.
That is the problem this role exists to solve. The Forward Deployed Consultant carries the business thread of an engagement end to end. You find where AI moves a real P&L lever, size and defend the case in a form a CFO will accept, write the response that wins the work, specify what gets built, build the prototype that sells it, and stay through delivery until the value shows up in the client's numbers.
This is a forward deployed role, based in India and deployed across India, MENA, the UK and Australia, for people with three to seven years behind them. You work inside the client's environment, alongside their people, onsite or remote as the engagement requires. Expect to rotate across engagements, sectors and geographies.
The role is AI-native in practice, not in description. You build your own demo-grade prototypes rather than briefing someone to build them, and you use AI tooling across research, modelling, drafting and analysis, because the proposal deadline is real and nobody is going to move it for you.
The role is not tiered. There is no version of this job where you run the analysis while a partner owns the client and a delivery lead owns the outcome. You own the diagnosis, the case, the win, the specification, the delivery and the number it lands on.
Responsibilities
Build the commercial view of the client, from the outside before access or from the inside once embedded, identify where AI moves a real P&L lever, and prioritise the opportunities worth pursuing.
Size and defend the business case: baseline, value drivers, cost to serve, productivity and headcount effects, payback and sensitivity, in a form a CFO will accept.
Own RFP and RFI responses end to end, from requirement matrix and compliance mapping through win themes, solution narrative, references and pricing story, to a submission that lands on time.
Write the PRD and functional specification the engineering team builds from, at a level of detail that removes ambiguity rather than passing it downstream.
Build demo-grade prototypes yourself using AI tooling, with the scripted flow and talk track that makes a client believe the thing before it exists.
Redesign the workflow around the solution, and lead the change management, adoption and training that decides whether any of it gets used.
Run the engagement: scope, plan, sequence, govern, escalate, manage the steering committee, and hold the commercial line on scope and margin when the client would prefer that you did not.
Track realised value against the case you signed up to…