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Capita has launched the Forward Deployed Orchestrator™ (FDO), a new operating model designed to help organisations turn AI investment into measurable operational results in the middle and back office.
The model addresses a growing challenge for businesses: while agentic AI tools can now be deployed quickly, making them work safely, reliably and at scale in live regulated environments is much harder. The Forward Deployed Orchestrator™ helps clients run AI-enabled processes safely and effectively after go-live, with a clear focus on adoption, performance and measurable operational results.
The challenge
Organisations are under pressure to show returns from AI investment, but many are finding that the hardest part comes after deployment. AI tools can be built and tested quickly, but they only deliver lasting value when they are embedded into live operations, adopted by teams, governed properly and improved as processes, rules and customer needs change.
This challenge is increasingly recognised across industry. Research shows that many organisations are still struggling to scale AI beyond pilots, with weak governance, unclear value and limited operational ownership among the most common barriers. MIT's 2025 study of enterprise generative AI found that around 95% of organisations see no measurable impact on the business, whilst McKinsey has reported that fewer than one in ten organisations have scaled agents in any single function.
The Capita solution
The Forward Deployed Orchestrator™ is an AI fluent process and change expert embedded directly in a client’s operation. Rather than building a solution and stepping away, the FDO runs the AI enabled process in the live environment, continuously improving performance and owning a clear, measurable outcome. The FDO is accountable for what traditional deployments miss: driving adoption so the ‘new way’ becomes the only way, optimising performance across the combined human-and-agent workforce and identifying opportunities to expand into new use cases from within day-to-day operations. While a forward deployed engineer builds and integrates the AI agent, the FDO ensures it delivers sustained results in practice.
Capita believes this model sets a new standard for deploying agentic AI in regulated environments: operate and own, not build and exit; platform agnostic, not tied to a single vendor; and accountable for outcomes, not just deployment. It is built on Capita’s long-standing experience running complex, regulated operations at national scale, combined with deliberate investment to make its workforce AI fluent. Proven first within Capita’s own operations, the model also addresses a growing governance gap as AI deployment outpaces control, ensuring human oversight on critical decisions, clear auditability, and continuous management as systems evolve.
Sameer Vuyyuru, Chief AI and Technology Officer at Capita said: “All of our clients are under pressure to deploy AI, but far fewer have anyone accountable for whether the AI continues to work once live. Building an agent is now the easy part; the real challenge starts in live, regulated middle and back-office operations, where a wrong answer carries real consequences.
“The Forward Deployed Orchestrator™ is designed to meet that challenge, embedding in the operation, running the process, tuning the technology, managing the change and, ultimately, taking ownership of the outcome. It is an approach grounded in our 40-plus years of running complex, regulated services, and one that ensures AI delivers sustained results, not just successful deployments.”
Live implementation
One of the first use cases for the Forward Deployed Orchestrator™ was high-volume recruitment, underpinned by Salesforce’s Agentforce. Capita deployed the model first within its own operations, using an internal FDO pod across recruitment, people and operations teams as ‘customer zero’. The results were delivered not by AI alone, but by combining the technology with Capita’s domain experts in recruitment and hiring back-office processes, who were critical to embedding the new way of working and realising the benefits. In the first four months of operations, Capita saved over 1,000 management and recruitment hours and cut candidate screening time by 43%.
In another regulated service, straightforward applications that previously took an average of four days to clear can now be completed in around 11 seconds, with AI reading and verifying documents, running authenticity and fraud checks, and referring cases to a human colleague with the necessary expertise where further review is needed.
Notes to editors
The Forward Deployed Orchestrator™ was highlighted at Salesforce Agentforce World Tour London on 18 June 2026. For more information on Capita’s Forward Deployed Orchestrator™ visit the webpage.
Sources:
- MIT, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 (Project NANDA, July 2025)
- McKinsey (QuantumBlack), The State of AI in 2025: Agents, Innovation, and Transformation (November 2025)
Contact Email:
media@capita.co.uk
About Capita
Capita is a modern outsourcer, helping clients across the public and private sectors run complex business processes more efficiently, creating better consumer experiences. Operating across eight countries, Capita’s colleagues support primarily UK and European clients with people-based services underpinned by market-leading technology. We play an integral role in society - our work matters to the lives of the millions of people who rely on us every day.
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