About Michael
Michael Labate is a Board Member at Growth Acceleration Partners with a distinguished record of transforming and scaling global sales organizations. As a leader in growth strategy and AI-enabled value creation, he brings extensive experience in M&A execution for PE and VC-backed firms. Michael is recognized for driving revenue acceleration and identifying strategic opportunities in dynamic technology environments.
Articles by Michael Labate 4
Michael Labate | August 11, 2026
How to Know When You Need a Forward Deployed Engineer, and How to Hire the Right One
The term “forward deployed engineer” is everywhere right now. Job postings for this “seemingly new role” grew 729% between April 2025 and April 2026. Source: Business Insider OpenAI has since launched a deployment company backed by more than $4 billion, while forward deployed roles are appearing across other big tech companies. For some, the term […]
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Michael Labate | July 9, 2026
Who Offers the Best Agentic AI Development Services for Mid-Market Companies?
Getting an agent up and running has never been easier. Off-the-shelf platforms, agent frameworks and foundation models have lowered the barrier to entry, putting a first deployment within reach of almost any organization. The challenge starts when that agent has to operate inside a real business. It needs access to company data, connections to existing […]
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Michael Labate | July 9, 2026
What Does an AI Agent Development Company Actually Do?
Search for help building an AI agent and you will find hundreds of firms that all describe themselves the same way, in the language of intelligent, autonomous and end-to-end solutions. But that language tells you (non-surprisingly) little about what the company would actually do for you in practice. The problem is that “AI agent development […]
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Michael Labate | May 20, 2026
Is Autonomous Software Engineering the Next Big Thing?
In March 2024, a startup called Cognition Labs released a short demo video showing an AI system called Devin receiving a software task, breaking it into steps, writing code, running tests, hitting errors, researching solutions on its own, and producing a working result without a human touching the keyboard. The company described it as the […]
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