The person you talk to builds it

Viter is me, Ben Friedman. I have spent over ten years on Atlassian and operations tooling, some of them as Aroundtown’s internal Jira lead, and I now work as a forward-deployed AI engineer on a fractional basis. In practice I sit inside a client’s systems a few days a week and build AI into one process at a time.

The formal line is: Viter, a forward-deployed AI engineering service run by Ben Friedman. The company was founded in 2022.

• Auditlab
• Leathwaite
• Disney
• WindWard
• MyCargoGate
• Quartz Health
• Drip Agency
• ivix

I started as the person a company calls when Jira has stopped matching how the work really runs. Since then I have migrated sites to Cloud, built service desks, written automation that other admins inherited, and shipped Forge apps for requirements no configuration could meet. At Aroundtown I ran Jira from the inside, which taught me what an outside consultant rarely sees: what a change costs the week after the consultant leaves.

Agencies sell a team and a statement of work. The work then passes from the person who sold it to the people who build it, and the understanding of your process thins at each handoff. AI projects are unusually sensitive to that loss, because the hard part is the process and its exceptions, and those live in conversations.

So I work the other way. I join the chat and the work tools your team already uses, for part of each week. Someone at your company owns the process, and I show working software weekly. The three stages of that engagement are on the FDE page.

A one-person service has to answer the question of what happens next, so here is mine. Shipped builds move into a monthly Run retainer, which keeps them working without taking my week. JAMES turns the most repeated part of my Jira work into a product. And Atlassian and Monday.com consultancies bring me in as their AI subcontractor, on the terms set out for partners.

Whether your problem needs AI at all. A fair share of the requests I hear are solved by a configuration change, an app that already exists, or an owner for a process that has none. I would sooner say that in thirty minutes than discover it in week six.