Scharfstein: Forward-deployed deployment goals must remain separate from sales incentives
Ben Scharfstein · How Scale AI is Pioneering the Future of Work · Aug 26, 2025 · at 36:19
Ben Scharfstein, Head of Product for Enterprise Applications at Scale AI, explains how enterprise AI startups should align incentives for forward-deployed engineering teams without devolving into a pure consulting business.
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“In terms of compensation structure, I'm not an expert, but I will say that I think in the forward deployed motion, the goal is to build a repeatable process through your customers and having that orthogonal to your go-to-market incentives is important because there's a healthy tension when you have that and you can say, Hey, actually we're not just focused on the size of the contract because when you do consulting, you can have very big contracts, but if you're selling people, you know, it's not really the most valuable thing. When you're doing this forward deployed motion, you're saying, Hey, we're using this as a wedge into big customers and we're using this as a way to learn. And that should be very orthogonal to your sales incentives.”
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