Everyone is talking about FDE recently, but more often than not, people hear about being trained to cut leeks.
There were too many people asking me privately, so I decided to compile my FDE experience from more than a year of AI implementation and training for state-owned enterprises and listed companies, and delivered multiple million-level projects, and share it with everyone, hoping to help students who really need it avoid pitfalls.
I believe that even if you don’t do FDE, this methodology can help you better understand business and delivery anywhere.
In fact, when I was writing this article, I just happened to listen to the FDE sharing session held by my friend Tata last night. After listening to it, I found that everyone is highly consistent with where I am stuck. It is basically impossible to escape these two types of situations:
The first category is pure novices who have just come out of a large factory, or who have some skills and want to go it alone. This group of people are brand-new leeks among experienced people in shopping malls (I am talking about business), and they are high-priced leeks with ready-made plans;
They wanted to take a few orders for enterprise AI implementation, but as a result, they either got a few plans for nothing, or they were outsourced for thousands of dollars at a cheap price. The requirements were changed to the point where they doubted their lives, and they couldn’t even get back the balance.
Why I have such a profound experience is because my partner made up his mind to implement AI with me after he “graduated” from well-known company
Then the two of us went to make a delivery for a well-known company (I won’t tell you which company, it’s a shame), an e-commerce company with about 400 employees. We didn’t sign any contract when we started doing research in the early stage, because it was the first big order for us.
We worked overtime for 3 days, basically spending every day in the early morning. Yes, the FDE you said had to be delivered on site, that was our daily routine at the time. As a result, we foolishly forgot to sign the contract.
On the third day of the plan, the other party said how well it went: We had a good talk and explained everything, but what was the result? On the fourth day, people said: Due to the current cash flow problem, AI support will not be considered for the time being. You know the rest of the content, they did it themselves, and we became the prostitutes for free.
Now that I think about it, it’s really funny. How to negotiate orders, words, and the delivery process are all unfamiliar to us. He doesn’t understand, and I only know how to deliver. As a result, the two of us together are “two idiots”, hahaha.
The second category is technical geeks who have already accumulated a small amount of experience in the C-side. You have very mature AI solutions in your hands, and you can use them very well. However, when you talk to the owners of traditional To B companies in China, you immediately feel acclimated. Why? I still have a say in this.
You tell the business owner how awesome this solution is, and he tells me: It sounds awesome, but I don’t know you, how can I trust you not to run away?
There is another version: Do you know how many copies can be reduced? What is the difference between you and workbuddy? Jump on the street immediately, why do I always emphasize not to reinvent the wheel! Don’t reinvent the wheel! Don’t want to reinvent the wheel?
Enterprises must decide that it is not an AI solution, but that it is suitable for their company and understands their business. Today’s AI era is not the Sass era. The main thing for enterprises is not software. Software is the least valuable, do you know.
In the past year or so, I have relied on FDE-related implementation scenarios to get several orders worth more than ten or two hundred thousand, and orders worth more than ten or tens of thousands, plus enterprise AI training. It can be said that I definitely have some experience to share with everyone. As an OPC, if you know GEO, you probably know what I have done in the past. If you don’t know, you can search “黄Ah code”.
Coupled with my struggles in to B business dismantling and technology implementation, I want to dismantle this FDE practical methodology that has been verified by real money for you without reservation. I hope that you can only learn and use the actions that can be directly copied.
one, What exactly is an FDE that allows you to receive money?
Many friends with a technical background are prone to self-indulgence as soon as they get started, or they turn themselves into “coolie programmers” who are paid on a per-day basis. This is no different from an outsourced worker, and is even worse than a contracted worker.
Before taking orders, please clear your mind of any technical obsession. The real FDE is essentially “Consulting + Agile Project Management + Technology “, did you see? The last word is “technology”. AI is just your tool. It can help companies solve business problems, obtain financial results, and achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase. This is the only reason for the boss to pay.
In practice, you must avoid three fatal misunderstandings and learn to translate “technical language” into “human language that the boss can understand”:
Don’t be technology/product centric:
❌ Incorrect expression: “Mr. Wang, I will help your company build a professional local knowledge base to help customer service respond to messages better.”
Let’s not talk about how high the threshold for local business entry is. Are you talking about human language? Traditional Boss: What is a knowledge base? Is customer service better at responding to messages? It means that our customer service is useless, so why should I ask them to come? Do you think the customer service I am looking for is not good?
✅ Correct translation: “Mr. Wang, I spent two weeks feeding the sales pitch and product information in your brains to AI to make an automatic reply assistant, so that a newcomer who has just been on the job for 3 days can answer 80% of the tricky questions of customers.”
Don’t focus on the superficial needs of customers:
99% of grassroots employees casually mention “make me a tool to automatically write weekly reports” are false demands. FDE must stand directly from the perspective of the boss to calculate whether this account can bring about an increase in core business. The workload you reduce for employees cannot be seen by the boss, but the process of reducing costs and increasing efficiency for the boss is obvious to the boss. Otherwise, why would someone say: FDE, it is best to start with the boss?
Refuse to fight alone:
If you encounter a vertical industry or technical blind spot that you don’t understand, don’t bite the bullet and write the code yourself. Nowadays, mature AI R&D tools have pushed the development cost to the extreme. What technology or awesome AI system? Forget it, put away your dopamine that makes you excited about technology.
You have to know that human beings live in groups, and the advantage of living in groups is that everyone gets what they need. If you are not good at it, there must be someone who is good at it. There are so many people who need to find jobs and are still waiting for food. Why don’t you think of yourself as an outsourcer and let others feel the power of outsourcing?
two,Which money should you definitely not make, and which scenarios can make big deals?
The most common mistake that many friends who have just entered the industry make is that they will accept everyone who comes. As long as the boss waves, they will rush in even if it is a chore worth several thousand yuan. As a result, they will be stuck in it for several months and cannot get out.
Last year when buttons were in hot demand, I had so many orders that I couldn’t take care of them, so I gave some orders to my students. When the students saw that there were orders available, they were so hungry that they immediately acted like they were about to “sell themselves out”, but in the end they really “buried” themselves in it.
The ROI didn’t count. The contract was signed when it arrived, and the project period was one month. As a result, the project was completed. He changed whatever the customer asked him to do, and made unlimited changes. In the end, the project cycle was delayed again and again, and it was not completed until the third month. Then the customer cut off almost 20% of the project’s payment due to project delays.
In the end, it took two people and three months. Guess how many signatures were collected? 3w5, I was really pissed off when I heard it🫢This is cheaper than college students. I said, how about you two come work for me? Just kidding. . .
So let me teach you another lesson:Before the ROI is calculated, even if the customer begs you to sign a contract, you will never sign it. Whether an AI project can be pushed forward within the company does not depend at all on how smart your model is, but more on the strategic weight of the matter in the boss’s mind.
1. The ROI funnel of the business model: Decisively cut off inefficient customization
If you don’t want to live your life like a 996 outsourcing foreman, when planning your business, directly compare these 5 business dimensions that I have summarized through pitfalls to accurately anchor your efforts:
Fully customized inefficiency outsourcing(Reusability: 0% / Net profit: extremely low): Rewrite the code for each customer’s needs and resolutely block it. You knew the reuse framework when you were a programmer. Why did you throw away this experience when you got to FDE?
Ultra-high premium customization for large customers(Reusability: Low / Net Profit: High): Although one order can last for half a year, it relies heavily on deep business relationships, and the delivery cycle can often take more than half a year. Don’t touch it if you are a novice without the endorsement of a big manufacturer. The point is that if you are OPC and don’t have diamonds, we will not take the porcelain job.
Standardized AI course sales(Reusability: 100% / Net profit: extremely low): Now the market is already a sea of blood, not a red sea, but a sea of blood. Once the class is sold, it is impossible to generate subsequent deep and high customer orders with the company.
Are you selling courses? No, it’s emotional value, it’s service, it’s the opportunity to link upward, do you understand?
Someone said to me before: Ah Ma, I want to buy courses. I said you go to Xianyu. You can buy a bunch of courses at Xianyu for a few dollars, and maybe those courses are better than mine, and that person is better than me.
AI training camp (Reusability: High / Net Profit: High): The most cost-effective way to break the situation, directly train business elites from various departments of the company to build workflows by themselves. You only charge consulting and coaching fees based on key points, and key points and key breakthroughs, every breakthrough is your experience.
Reusable enabling modules for vertical industries(Reusability: extremely high / Net profit: extremely high): The ultimate evolution direction is to refine the SOPs verified by previous customers into standardized modules, maintain 60%-80% of the underlying reusability across customers, and truly exert the marginal effect. If you can achieve this level, don’t think about it, you are Top, 100% Top, Top in revenue, Top in influence, Top in customer referrals.
2. Judging scene red and black lists from multiple dimensions
When you get a request from a customer, how do you judge whether it can be accepted? Don’t listen to what the contact person says. Numbers are the most intuitive. How many people can be killed, how much cost can be saved, how many effects can be achieved, or even how many risks can be avoided.
❌ See the “low-value black list” that is directly bypassed:
Small-volume administrative/financial efficiency improvement: For example, if a company has 3-5 people in administration and finance combined, you can use AI to cut off 4 people and save about 600,000 yuan a year. This little money is not a big deal to the boss, but if you try to take advantage of the jobs of these old employees, the internal resistance will be so great that it will make you doubt your life.
General enterprise knowledge base: 90% of technical people love to take on this kind of work and find it easy to build a RAG. But after you finish it, you can’t prove to your boss “how much more money this knowledge base helped the company make last month.” The grassroots employees don’t use it because they find it troublesome. It’s a typical “high resistance, low value” fire pit.
✅ “High Value Red List” with eyes closed:
Sales and customer acquisition incremental scenarios: Never touch the long and decadent old processes within the company, directly help the sales team improve efficiency, or use self-media AI to acquire customers. Years ago, I worked on overseas + AI for an Internet company. I used a complete set of mature workflow + AI training. When the sales manager met a new employee, he threw in a customer service agent for training. I used AI for self-media acquisition. The self-media expert team cooperated with the company’s internal professional approach, and it immediately became popular.
You may ask, are you not afraid of resistance from people within the company? Hey, that’s wrong. The Internet, especially overseas companies, is also involved. Especially after the rise of workbuddy, the information gap has gradually been flattened. Your time-saving and effort-saving can allow sales to get more commissions, with a high degree of cooperation, which greatly reduces zero conflicts of interest.
Internal business risk management and control: For example, AI optimized management of enterprise commercial insurance systems. Even though this matter may only involve 1-2 positions in the company, once it goes through, it can directly help medium and large enterprises save 2-3 million yuan in wasted money every year, and the boss will not blink when paying. “This experience comes from the sharing of industry leaders. I agree very much, so I list it here.”
3. Vertical track selection? That’s enough🫷I suggest you don’t think so far ahead
Many novices are struggling before they start taking orders: “Which vertical industry should I choose as my lifelong career path?”
stop! Until we successfully deliver 5-10 real paying customers, you and I are still just scratching the surface of To B commercialization. If you don’t have any industry accumulation in your hands now, go to the pan-industry to take orders in the first three months, even if it is a small order, first run through the complete closed loop from research, dismantling SOP to collection!
When you have accumulated more than 5 real cases in your hand, you can immediately gather your battle lines and choose one of these three golden subdivision tracks to fight to the death:
High customer single C-side service industry: After running through a customer acquisition or sales conversion workflow, you don’t even need to redo it every time. You can directly charge tool subscription fees, or sell customer leads by piece to earn light cash flow. Moreover, C-side services are the most prone to fission. You only need to teach the downstream how to deliver, and you only take a commission. Isn’t it great?
“Huangma, isn’t this called FDE?” Does FDE have to be aimed at enterprises? Isn’t OPC a person? Aren’t Taobao sellers individuals? Concepts are dead, but people are alive. We can reach the same destination by different paths. If you still struggle with this concept, how about you publish a book?
Manufacturing non-standard customization: Although the process is complicated, the industry barriers are extremely high once it is passed. My friend’s team specializes in FDE for the manufacturing industry. I can only say that it is extremely good. His order has been scheduled until the New Year.
Many people say that no one can do it in the manufacturing industry. They are wrong. Every industry has its own barriers. It just means that your level of deep cultivation is not enough, and the manufacturing process is smelly and long. This is indeed true, but people want to ensure that business and risks can meet expectations.
Pay attention to the sinking market: Don’t keep staring at Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou and the big companies. If you just focus on Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou, you will basically rush to the street. Why? As far as I know, there is no shortage of FDEs in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, but there is a shortage of experienced FDEs.
But in some second- and third-tier cities, even FDEs find it very novel. If you go there, let alone implement enterprise AI, even if you go there to hold a training, it will be a dimensionality reduction attack.
However, there is another but, wherever you go there are people who are of the world, and there are “local cowards” everywhere you go, so I want to say one more thing:The wisdom of the world is a knowledge that needs to be learned throughout your life.Regarding how to understand and how to dig out, come on, let me tell you next.
three, Efficient customer acquisition path: Don’t blindly join the circle, how to accurately reach the top leaders of the company?
When many technical friends who have just come out to work alone, when it comes to finding customers, their first reaction is to send business cards to various entrepreneurial groups and participate in free salons to exchange WeChat. As a result, I added 500 people on WeChat and chatted for three months. They were all colleagues who wanted to find work just like you, or they were “fake customers” who came to take advantage of your free plan.
One of the most outrageous technicians I have ever seen is that he sells cloud services while doing technology. I have known him for 10 years, and he has been doing this kind of work for 10 years, and he is still struggling to make ends meet. I asked him, how do you sell products, and he said: Join a bunch of programmer groups, and then send them to groups every day.
As a result, in the past 10 years, as long as someone mentioned him in the group, they would know that he was selling cloud services. But why is there no business? Because as a programmer, you know very well how much money you can earn in this industry. You can work on a server for as low as 88 yuan/year. How much do you think the gross profit is here? Once prices in an industry become transparent, selling to peers is basically a dead end.
Back here, when doing To B business, transaction efficiency only depends on two things:
First, whether the person sitting opposite you is the leader of the company, even if he is not the leader, he must be able to make decisions;
Second, do you have any specific products or success stories?
1. Customer Acquisition Channel Effectiveness Matrix: Focus on these 4 high-conversion paths
Stop doing ineffective social networking and reconstruct your customer acquisition funnel from high to low according to the conversion rate I have verified:
Bring concrete products + into vertical industries
Don’t go to the kind of AI technology conference where all programmers are there, where all your competitors are. Go to boss summits in various industries, or high-end paid forums. Holding a demo of an industry pain point that has been solved in your hand, go to the stage to dismantle it for 15 minutes. The boss sitting in the audience will take the initiative to queue up and add you on WeChat.
A colleague of mine used to like to go to various summit forums and summits after he lost his job. I asked him why he went there, and he said: I’m going to join in the fun and bridge the information gap. I said: Is it a tie? He said: No, I feel like I am cutting leeks. I said: Why can’t you be the one cutting leeks?
Get the leader in the industry
Each industry has a few core pivotal figures (such as the secretary-general of an industry association and the core of a local chamber of commerce). Just bind them directly and give you a full rebate mechanism. My idea is: once the benefits are in place, they will help you push an order and support you with all your hard work. So the knowledge of human nature is good and you must learn it.
Public welfare endorsement from the government and the park (highest trust level): Take the initiative to provide free public welfare AI science training to local government departments and industrial park management committees. You don’t need to make money from this class, but once you have the endorsement of a “special AI lecturer invited by a certain district government”, the doors of hundreds of manufacturing companies in the park will be directly open to you.
Public domain high frequency actual output: If you don’t want to show your face and take a video, you can use the low-cost method of “picture and text screenshots + screen recording explanation”. Don’t post boring code tutorials, just post how you help customers solve specific stuck points. Many people think this is not something of high value and no one wants to see it.
Wrong, when pornographic code first started to output content in the public domain, I was very disdainful when I saw other people’s novice content getting thousands or tens of thousands of likes. Until I came out, the society was hit, because the only one who can really understand you in the market is yourself. If you want others to understand you, you must first explain yourself clearly.
Even if you don’t know how to chat and say that your writing is not good, please, now that there is AI, chat with AI, retell the pain points and results when the specific AI is implemented, and then throw it to AI to organize it into notes, and then remove the AI flavor. Don’t say that you don’t even know how to use AI, right? So what else are you doing to implement AI?
2. 1 Recruit to screen out 99% of free prostitutes
After you make some progress in self-media or referrals, you will definitely encounter this kind of soul asking on WeChat: “Teacher, help our company build an AI knowledge base/intelligent customer service system. How much does it cost?”
remember! When encountering this kind of problem, absolutely, absolutely do not report specific numbers directly on WeChat! Once you apply for “50,000” or “200,000”, the other party will most likely reply to you with “Okay, I will report it to the leader”, and then nothing will happen.
My team is currently implementing a standard “three-step funnel screening method”:
first step: The standard reply is, “Hello, AI implementation is different from buying traditional software. Each company’s business process is different. Direct quotation without taking a look at the site will either cost you money or we will not be able to deliver.”
Step two: Then he said, “Well, we happen to be near you. How about we make an appointment tomorrow to help you go through the business process on site and give you a realistic assessment. Do you think 2 o’clock or 4 o’clock on Thursday is more convenient?”
Step three:If the other party refuses to meet, they must force you to quote a price first: 100% it is a grassroots employee completing the “price comparison task” assigned by the leader, or a low-quality inquiry with no budget. End the conversation directly and politely. Don’t waste a second. Don’t feel it is a pity. Is it a pity that your time is precious?
If the other party readily agrees to meet offline: Congratulations, this is definitely a prospective customer with real pain points and a budget. When you go to the site, you can not only see the company’s operating status at a glance, but also find out whether the contact person is the boss himself, a core executive, or a marginal department head who has no say.
Having said so much, we have reached the point where we have to conduct a landing evaluation for the company. We cannot avoid the issue of money. How should we inquire for a price?
Four,How to negotiate a high premium of hundreds of thousands for an order?
When it comes to FDE consultation and implementation, there is no so-called “unified fair price” in the market.
Many friends with a technical background go to negotiate prices with their bosses, and they always use programmers’ thinking: “I will write about 500 lines of code for this function, use 3 APIs, including the server cost… I will quote you 15,000.”
Please, stop it now! This kind of “own cost plus” quotation method will not only make no money, but will also make the boss think that you are a cheap outsourcer. There is only one iron law at the core of To B business quotation:The quotation depends on the customer’s business volume, pain point severity and psychological anchor point.has nothing to do with how many hours you actually spent writing the code.
The following negotiation content is partly shared by netizens who are professional in FDE. I think it is very well written and surpasses Huang Ama’s negotiation skills when it comes to implementation. (Haha, technical people have weak negotiation skills, we have to admit it)
1. Standardized Product Matrix: Build Your Level 4 Quotation Coordinate System
Before you go to negotiate with customers, you must have this set of clearly layered product echelons in your backpack.
If you are not sure, I will give you a set of formulas, which are also relatively recognized in the industry:
(Your original monthly salary from a big factory × 2) ÷ 21.75 days As your external minimum price per person per day, multiply it by 1.5 times the project cycle redundancy to quote. By the way, don’t calculate it based on hourly wages, and don’t think of yourself as a machine that runs 24 hours a day.
2. The “psychological anchor method” to find out the boss’s budget
Just sitting across from the boss, how do you know whether he can afford 50,000 or 500,000? Don’t directly ask “What is your budget?” Instead, look at his company’s annual revenue and switch to different references:
Facing companies with annual revenue of 30 million to 50 million:
Communication focus: Help him calculate the hard head account.
Discourse logic: “Our current e-commerce customer service team has 10 people, and the basic salary and social security are hundreds of thousands more per year. We have opened up this set of AI skills, even if we only help you replace 3 people and improve the conversion rate of 7 others, we can steadily save more than 250,000 yuan a year. This single-point system will charge you 190,000 yuan, and the cost has been paid back in the first year.”
For large enterprises with annual revenue of 200 million to 500 million and above:
Communication focus: Don’t deduct tens of thousands of yuan in labor fees from him. Bosses at this level don’t care about tens of thousands of yuan at all. They focus on “organizational loss accounts and management risks.”
Discourse logic: “For every three extra days of wrangling in our cross-department collaboration, the delivery cycle of a multi-million-dollar project will be delayed by half a month. What our system solves is not the speed of typing, but the interdepartmental review and standards stuck in the process, directly cutting management losses by 30%.”, directly raising his psychological anchor to the million-dollar level.
As an OPC, I really haven’t noticed the cross-department efficiency improvement of the organization. I think this content is worth more than the price of a training camp.
3. 4 tips for high-ranking people at the negotiation table
Words determine life and death:Never talk about layoffs or support. In front of corporate executives, it is strictly forbidden to say: I will help your company lay off employees and downsize. Not only does this turn the entire company into your enemy, it also scares management.
The correct way to say it is: “We use AI to condense the experience of your best employees into SOPs, which can be reused in the future even for employee promotions or new employees onboarding.”
Large orders for informal venues:To B’s serious reports can only finalize demand. Those who can really finalize high-premium cooperation are often in informal settings such as dinner parties and tea rooms. Put down the PPT and chat with the boss like friends about his current industry anxieties.
Keep the cost trump card:If a customer you meet for the first time insists on forcing you to provide a detailed bill of materials, details of working hours, or even telling you the words “person/day × unit price”, he is most likely using your list to compare prices with cheaper suppliers.
My approach is: resolutely report only overall business value solutions, which can also be saidBreak the ice with a diagnostic package first and build trust before moving on to bigger projectssometimes trusting these two words exceeds all your efforts.
Just like sometimes when I have extra orders, I just let them go to teams that have worked with me before. I give priority to unfamiliar teams because I have suffered too many losses in the integration and delivery of unfamiliar teams. It is clear that I have not made a penny, and in the end I have to wipe their butts for them.
five,From self-employment to large-scale: the final evolution of FDE and the two-wheel business model
It is not difficult to earn tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands a month by doing FDE alone, but this is still essentially exchanging personal time for money.
The window period of the agent market is limited. Once the underlying model becomes more native and the internal digital infrastructure of the enterprise is generally mature, and the company simply relies on entering the enterprise to provide information-based services, the premium space will inevitably be greatly compressed.
Therefore, when you have achieved cash flow through the 5-10 projects in the early stage, you must immediately productize your service experience and build a “B-end high-passenger single support + lightweight customization” delivery structure.
1. Scenario distillation: Upgrading customized outsourcing into “modular assets”
Is the ultimate value of FDE always writing customized code for enterprises? No, it’s about constant “scene distillation”.
After serving several customers in the same track in a row, you will find that 80% of their business pain points, approval processes and even prompt word logic are highly similar.
What you have to do at this time is simple:
Extract the underlying commonalities: The hard-coded logic for individual customers is stripped away, and standardized “data cleaning components”, “industry-specific Prompt libraries”, etc. are precipitated;
Reserve 10%-20% customized interface: When facing new customers, the base directly calls ready-made modules, and it only takes 2-3 days to fine-tune 20% of the outer logic based on the company’s unique SKU or business rules;
Business model transition: Instead of quoting based on customized development hours, we directly sell “industry vertical empowerment module access fee + annual subscription fee”. This can not only compress the delivery cycle from one month to a few days, but also truly enjoy the marginal benefits of the software.
2. Two-wheel drive: the complementarity of high-end single B-end and lightweight cash flow
A healthy independent technical team or FDE individual should never put eggs in one basket. The ideal business combination is “two-wheel drive”:
B-end high customer order consultation and implementation:Maintain in-depth accompanying or diagnostic services for 1-2 key enterprises every month. This part is responsible for providing sufficient cash reserves and in-depth industry endorsement;
Lightweight realization and diversion of public domain:During the delivery gap, make full use of the well-run AI business at hand to deliver to small B-sides. You can package efficiency improvement methods into lightweight practical lessons or knowledge planet communities; use automated flows to batch produce vertical content in specific fields to accumulate influence on public domain platforms.
It can not only provide you with stable long-tail passive income, but more importantly, it itself is a continuous public domain drainage funnel, continuously screening and delivering the next batch of high-intention business leaders for you.
six, Technology stack is enough
After talking so much, we finally come to the technical part. Come on, let’s arrange the chat: Many friends who are just preparing to do FDE are confused as soon as they open the technical roadmap on the Internet: Python, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Milvus, LangChain, various open source model fine-tuning, multi-agent collaboration, various evaluation indicators… There are dozens of them. It seems that if you don’t learn all this, you are not even qualified to talk to customers.
Enough, I suggest you not to think about things so complicatedly. Before entering into the actual actual dismantling, please engrave the following sentence in your mind:
In enterprise-level non-cutting-edge business scenarios, complex technology is often the enemy of delivery.
You are not playing a professional competition at the to B site, let alone publishing a conference paper. You do not need to be a senior expert in CUDA operators. What you really need to master is the ability to solve problems.
1. Basic development: I can click twice on the platform, but I’m still far from being able to deliver it.
Many friends think that they have just graduated if they can use ready-made tools to build processes. Some students came to me before and said, “Teacher, I am already very good at playing Coze and Dify. Have I learned how to make intelligent agents?”
I asked casually: “Then do you know how to do state management in the data link? How do you write retry logic when the interface reports an error?” The other party was stunned on the spot, so he must have understood the reason why:
Friends with non-technical background: You don’t have to be proficient in the underlying code, but you must be able to explain the rules thoroughly in clear business language;
Friends responsible for code implementation: The core competency does not lie in how many unpopular languages you have mastered, but in basic engineering literacy. Whether it is Python or TypeScript, you must be able to understand the terminal error log, determine the environment configuration, version management and dependency conflicts. If the external API hangs, can the existing business logic be downgraded, instead of directly causing the entire page to collapse with a white screen.
2. Cleaning up the format does not mean that the content is correct
I found that some FDEs are very easy to be lazy when doing data cleaning. They think that as long as they align the fields in the CSV or database, they will be done. Real business data often hides a lot of hidden pits. Let me give you a few cases:
Implicit conversion problem: For example, the number of an old device is “0017”, which is a unique identifier in the system. Many novices will convert it to the number 17 by default when they read the script. When the result is followed by string matching in another table, the system always reports “No such device found”.
Traps of inconsistent caliber: Department A’s report says “Completed”, which means “the frontline technicians have completed the maintenance”; Department B’s system says “Completed”, which means “Finance has received the customer confirmation.” Fields with the same name in the two systems are not the same thing at all. If you don’t check it with a salesperson face to face and directly merge the two tables, the calculated report will be 100% wrong.
SQL associated row count trap: A fault work order is associated with 3 historical maintenance records. When doing table correlation query, directly counting the rows will result in 3 records instead of 1 work order. If you don’t pay attention to these, it will be revealed when you go to the customer site for a demonstration.
3. Prompt and context
It is not difficult to write a good prompt word. What is difficult is to understand the boundaries of the information processed by the model:
Fluency does not equal correctness: The underlying logic of the model is to predict the next text unit based on probability. No matter how righteous the answer is, don’t believe the “nonsense” it says;
token is not a simple character count: It directly hooks your API call overhead and response latency. In addition to doubling the cost of a single call and slowing down the response, cramming tens of thousands of words in without thinking will also dilute the key attention of the model;
Temperature parameter reduced to 0 does not mean absolutely accurate: Lowering the temperature can reduce the randomness of answers, but it cannot eliminate hallucinations. For scenes in key areas, it is necessary to do a second trip or a hot trip.
4. What is industrial grade RAG
In countless unfinished so-called “enterprise knowledge base” projects, some people often operate in extremely crude ways: stuffing dozens of Words, PDFs, and tables into open source frameworks, cutting them into pieces according to fixed lengths, throwing them into vector databases, and then counting on the model to help users find answers based on semantic similarity.
This approach is almost certain to fail in real business. For example, when a customer asks about “the cleaning process of the old A1 model”, the vector database directly retrieves the “maintenance instructions of the latest A3 model” due to similar semantics. The model will follow the nonsense and the on-site workers will damage the equipment if they follow the instructions.
When FDE implements industrial-grade RAG, an iron rule must be implemented:
Exclusive principle:Before calling vector calculation, you must first perform hard filtering through business metadata (Metadata) or SQL, and directly physically isolate incompatible slices in the underlying storage. As for how to do this, this is another long technical article. We will talk about it when we have the opportunity.
5. Workflow and Agent: Never abuse complex decisions if they can be solved with simple processes
Don’t think that multi-agent collaboration is particularly cool right from the beginning. Giving the model too much independent planning power often means uncontrollable accumulation of errors.
An enterprise-level solution that can be delivered stably usually follows this evolution rhythm:
First use deterministic conditional branches. If A is true, go to step one. If it is not true, go to step two. 80% of the business process will be blocked to ensure that the backbone logic is absolutely stable;
Only when processing fuzzy intent understanding, multi-source document refining, and other single-point links that really require flexible judgment can lightweight agents be mounted to call tools.
For businesses that can be solved using conditional judgment, large models will never be allowed to play freely in it.this is an effective project that allows you to get the final payment.
OK, I wrote this article for two whole days and two nights. In fact, there is a lot of practical knowledge about FDE, and I can’t finish it in a while. This time we will write it here. Welcome to like and collect it. If everyone’s feedback is good, I will consider writing an advanced article.
That’s it for today’s sharing. I am Huang Ah Ma, the code of code words. If you think what I say makes sense, please feel free to click three times. If you feel you have any objections, please feel free to correct me in the comment area. We are all co-creators of the AI era.
/2026/11/04/6aeae73eec29b774856903.jpg "Route du Rhum : le navigateur Armel Le Cléac’h, un des favoris, a chaviré durant la nuit mais est en “sécurité”")