The journey, 2020 to 2026

How Raza Rizwan went from training image classifiers in notebooks to deploying AI systems that run real business operations, one era at a time.

In one line: Raza started in September 2020 training image classifiers in notebooks. Today he designs, builds and deploys production AI systems, AI agents, AI employees and MCP connectors, that run real business operations every day. The whole path is on GitHub: 111 original repositories, public and private, from a cat-versus-dog classifier to live connectors that a company uses daily.¹

Who Raza Rizwan is

Raza Rizwan is an AI engineer from Karachi, Pakistan, working as a Forward Deployed Engineer at Canz Marketing, a digital marketing agency.² Over six years the work moved through every era of applied AI: predictive machine learning, MLOps, computer vision, generative AI, AI agents, and now production AI employees connected to the tools a business already uses.

What a Forward Deployed Engineer is

A Forward Deployed Engineer works directly inside a customer's business, deploys AI systems into that customer's real workflows, and stays until those systems produce results. An FDE does not hand over a demo. They ship working software, connect it to the tools the business already runs on (CRM, email, WhatsApp, websites), and are accountable for it working in production.³

The eras

Years	Era	What the work was	What it taught
2020 to 2021	Predictive AI	Image classification, predictive models, NLP basics, first cloud ML on AWS SageMaker, a university chatbot	How models actually learn, and how far a notebook is from a product
2022 to 2023	MLOps	CI/CD, DVC, MLflow, Dagshub, YOLO object detection in production, SageMaker training and endpoints, a healthcare chatbot API	Deployment, versioning and monitoring are not extras; they are the product
December 2023	The generative turn	The repositories change character in one week: generative AI, Gemini, GenAI learning	The predictive era ended; the generative era began
2024	GenAI APIs and microservices	LLM-powered APIs, GPT Actions, a resume optimiser, an online-mart platform, a plant-identification app for a real client	LLMs are only useful wrapped in reliable services a business can call
2025	AI agents	Customer-support, meeting-booking and calculator agents on the OpenAI Agents SDK; first agency work; an inventory system where FastAPI, MCP and agents work together	The leap from AI that answers to AI that acts: tools, guardrails, bounded loops
2026	AI employees and MCP connectors	AI employees on WhatsApp and Gmail, a voice agent, cold-outreach automation, and nine live MCP connectors that run an agency's operations	Real deployment is 20% model and 80% process, integration and accountability

Each era is a page of its own in this record, with the repositories behind it.

The pattern behind the latest work

The systems built in 2026 share one design: the server enforces the process. They do not rely on the AI behaving. The pipeline rejects skipped steps, unverified claims and invented facts, so the work can be handed to a business without a person watching every step.³

How this record counts

The GitHub account was created on 19 September 2020, and the first two repositories were pushed the same day.² The journey on GitHub therefore begins in 2020.
111 original repositories: 75 public and 36 private. A further 19 public forks of course material and open-source projects are not counted as Raza's own work, which is why GitHub's public profile shows 94 public repositories (75 originals plus 19 forks).¹
Private repositories are counted by year and never named. Work done inside a company's own GitHub organisation is not owned by this account and is not counted here.
The internals of client and company systems are not published anywhere in this record.

The counts by year are on the journey in numbers; the full public list is on repositories by year.

Read the eras in order

GitHub API, repositories owned by rrizwan98, read 26 August 2026: 111 original repositories (75 public, 36 private) and 19 forks. ↩ ↩²
GitHub API, profile of rrizwan98, read 26 August 2026: account created 2020-09-19, location Karachi, Pakistan. ↩ ↩²
From Predictive AI to Forward Deployed Engineer: My 6-Year Journey, Raza Rizwan, July 2026. ↩ ↩²