Collide AI 2025 Wrapped Part 1: Why Forward Deployed Engineers Ship When AI Pilots Fail

About this episode

The episode discusses the advantages of forward deployed engineers over AI pilots in the energy sector.

Collide AI 2025 Wrapped Part 1 turns into a real talk on why forward deployed engineers win where AI pilots stall, with Michael Cortez, John, and Nick Smart swapping war stories from completions, geophysics, and the startup trenches while they map out how Collide Enterprise moves past basic chat tools into search plus workflows that actually hold up in the real world. Click here to watch a video of this episode. Join the conversation shaping the future of energy. Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward. Apply today at collide.io Click here to view the episode transcript. 00:00 Setup and intros 00:45 Michael’s path and joining Collide 01:59 Nick’s background and role shift 03:08 Collide Enterprise vs community 04:16 Search, RAG, and workflow evolution 06:31 Why out of the box AI falls short 08:41 Time savings and real work focus 11:39 Single source of truth vision 13:16 Small teams scaling bigger assets 17:18 AI adoption vs past tech hype 19:26 Digital transformation missing link 20:20 Why FDEs make pilots work 23:36 Biggest…

People in this episode

Guests: Michael Cortez, John, Nick Smart

Topics covered

• AI
• engineering
• digital transformation
• energy
• workflows
• technology

Keywords

• AI pilots
• forward deployed engineers
• Collide Enterprise
• digital transformation
• energy industry

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Collide, Collide Enterprise, oil & gas

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