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Podcast Episode Notes: Beyond The Prompt - The AI Playbook Every Leader Needs
Episode Overview Title: The AI Playbook Every Leader Needs: A Chat With Adam Brotman & Andy Sack Hosts: Jeremy Utley & Henrik Werdelin Special Guests: Adam Brotman & Andy Sack Description: Adam and Andy discuss their book "AI First," the framework for leaders to adopt AI in their organizations, emphasizing that AI is a leadership reset requiring new playbooks and mindsets.
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Key Concept Summaries
- AI as a Leadership Reset
- Definition: AI is not just another technology; it requires a fundamental shift in how organizations approach leadership, structure, and competition.
- New Playbook Needed: Leaders must develop new frameworks that prioritize AI's potential to augment human intelligence rather than replace it.
- AI as an Augmentation Tool
- Ironman Suit Metaphor: Leaders should view AI as an augmentation tool that enhances their decision-making and operational capabilities.
- Human-Centric Approach: Emphasis on fostering a culture where AI complements human intelligence, leading to smarter, faster decision-making.
- Importance of Culture and Experimentation
- Cultural Shift: Organizations must cultivate a culture that encourages experimentation, curiosity, and rapid prototyping.
- Mindset Over Tools: The right mindset is more critical than the tools themselves; companies should focus on governance and frameworks that facilitate AI adoption.
- Urgency of AI Adoption
- Critical Time Frame: Organizations delaying AI integration risk falling behind; acting now is essential to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving landscape.
- AI Literacy: Leaders should foster AI literacy across their organizations to enable effective use and integration.
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Key Takeaways
- AI as a Co-Intelligence Tool: Embracing AI can help leaders make better decisions and guide their organizations more effectively.
- Need for Governance: Organizations must establish structures (e.g., AI councils) to ensure responsible AI experimentation and integration.
- Adaptability is Crucial: Leaders must be ready to adapt their organizations quickly as AI technologies continue to evolve.
- Balancing Innovation with Safety: While leveraging AI, there must be a focus on safety measures to mitigate risks associated with its use.
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Episode Highlights
- Introduction (00:00)
Discussion on the urgency of AI and its implications for businesses.
- Meet the Authors (00:19)
Adam Brotman and Andy Sack introduce themselves and their backgrounds.
- Defining AI-Forward Leadership (03:43)
Characteristics and mindset needed for leaders to embrace AI effectively.
- AI Adoption and Resistance (05:02)
Addressing the challenges organizations face in adopting AI technologies.
- Importance of Mindset (08:01)
The necessity of a proactive mindset over merely utilizing tools.
- Experimentation, Governance & Culture (09:39)
How to create an environment conducive to AI experimentation.
- Organizational Redesign (14:09)
Rethinking organizational structures to accommodate AI integration.
- Future of AI (46:14)
Speculation on the role of AI in future organizations and the development of autonomous agents.
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Conclusion The episode concludes with reflections on the broader implications of AI on business and leadership, emphasizing the need for urgency, adaptability, and a cultural shift towards embracing experimentation. Leaders are encouraged to engage actively with AI technologies to enhance their organizational effectiveness and maintain a competitive edge.
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Additional Resources
- AI First Book: [AI First Book | Forum3](https://www.forum3.com/ai-first-book)
- Digital Strategy for the AI Era | Forum3: [Forum3](https://www.forum3.com/)
- Related LinkedIn Profiles:
- [Andy Sack](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andysack/)
- [Adam Brotman](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adambrotman/)
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Suggested Actions for Leaders
- Begin integrating AI tools across all levels of the organization.
- Foster a culture of curiosity and experimentation.
- Establish governance structures that facilitate responsible AI use.
- Prioritize AI literacy and training for all employees.
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These notes encapsulate the essence of the podcast episode, providing a structured overview of its key discussions and takeaways for leaders looking to leverage AI in their organizations.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00If you're not engaging with AI at your business, you're behind. If you're not having a holy shit moment, you're not paying attention. And I think there's going to be massive resistance and chaos. And meanwhile, the technology will advance. Hi, I'm Andy Sack, co-CEO and co-founder of Forum3 and also co-author of AI First, a playbook for future-proofing your business and brand. My background, I'm a career technologist. I started in internet companies in the 90s, became a venture capitalist during Web2, and now during the AI era, I'm back to my entrepreneurial roots with my dear friend, Adam Brotman.
0:46I'm Adam Brotman. I am the other side of the co of all the things Andy just said, co-CEO, co-founder, and co-author of our company, Form 3, and our book, AI First. My background is I was chief digital officer of Starbucks for most of my career, also the president of J.Crew. And I love consumer brands in the intersection of digital technology and brand building. And that's what Andy and I are working on, both on our company, Form 3, but also with our book, AI First. AI First. For folks who aren't familiar with the book, who aren't familiar with your work, can you tell us what's the premise of the book?
1:25What's your core argument? Premise of the book, AI First, is trying to answer the question of what does it actually mean to be an AI first company when gen AI really just kind of hit us a few years ago and it's moving super fast. We all knew and came to know what it meant to be a digital first company and then a mobile first company. But none of us, including Andy and I, supposed digital thought leaders and digital transformation experts had any idea what it would mean to be an AI first company. So we actually researched that question by talking to some of the world's leading AI lab leaders, as well as business experts.
2:10And the premise of the book basically says AI-first companies start with AI-first leaders, that you need to understand that this is a co-intelligence tool, not just, you know, don't think of like your parents' AI. I think of this as a completely different way of augmenting how you make better decisions faster as an individual leader, as well as how you integrate it into everything you do as a company. and we, as a result of that insight, we developed a playbook in the book that actually tries to, in a future-proof way, irrespective of how fast and powerful the AI is and all the new things that are going to happen, allows business leaders to get their whole company to understand that insight that I just mentioned about how this is like an Iron Man suit, that this is about individual co-intelligence, and then allows them to integrate it and scale it within their organization.
3:08And that's essentially the arc of the book and the essence of what came up with in the book. I usually let Adam go first so that I can chime in and have at the end with the succinct version. The premise of the book is AI is a holy ship moment. Brace yourselves, all of us, for the speed of development of AI, and you need a playbook. And so we develop the playbook by talking to lots of smart people. So the playbook may be the playbook second. You mentioned something, Adam, I want to come back to, which is the leader. How do you define kind of an AI forward leader? What are the behaviors, habits, routines, et cetera, that are call up for the quintessential AI first leader?
3:55What's it look like? It starts with a mindset. So it's less about like individual specific actions, but a leader, particularly the CEO of a company. Let's say that we talk about that a lot in the book, that it actually has to start at the very top of the organization, that the leader is encouraging the company to have that holy shit moment that Andy just mentioned. and that everybody has to internalize just how powerful and fast-moving and dynamic and sometimes jagged this technology can be. So people need to get their hands on it. They need to be curious. They need to be willing to experiment.
4:34And that has to come from the top as opposed to some set of rules or typical technology implementation training. This is much more about experimentation and a mindset and a willingness to sort of keep trying things and figure out what works and what doesn't. And that will lead to an AI first culture and rewiring of how people do things. How much do you think that people are actually following the playbooks? and I'm asking because we've done a bunch of interviews now with people from companies that are considered like pretty advanced in what they do and the and the feeling we get is that everybody is just getting started and that some you know like talk about like you know they have 80 percent of you know their staff using and stuff like that but if you ask I think it was the CEO the founder of Sabia we asked him like how far do you think you are in your journey from zero to 10 And he's like, we're probably a three.
5:38And you like, compared to everybody else, they were probably like a nine. Who'd you ask that question of? Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier. Oh. Yeah. And I think, you know, he's like, obviously like a parent art founder. So probably like there are some elements of that, but it does seems that a lot of people kind of like, don't really, I'm not really getting kind of like the effect that they think they can get out of it yet. I mean, he, Henrik, he, He called a code red. I don't know, Andy and Adam, if you're familiar with what Wade and his team have done at Zapier, but they declared a code red where they told everybody take a week off work and do a deep dive.
6:16To your point, Adam, I think AI first leaders got to start by kind of hitting the alarm bell. I think most organizations, though, don't feel it's a code red moment if they're honest. The vast majority of organizations go, that seems a bit excessive. I mean, I was talking to a CEO yesterday who said, I don't want to alarm people. That was actually his verbatim quote. I think that's right. I think, I mean, it goes back, I think, to the jagged frontier of, and the relativism of the deployment and usage of AI, which is, I don't know, you know, Wade's probably right. He's probably at a three in his journey and he, you know, in his mind, because of what, because he has an understanding of how fast the technology is moving and how significant of a change in the world and business for his business, total digital business this is, he's probably at a three.
7:12And that's calling a code red and saying, take a week off. And the number of CEOs who have declared code red is probably two or 3 % of the hundreds that we've spoken to you talk to somebody else who's in a you know in the professional sports business they own a baseball team you know the seattle mariners let's say and you know they could they they don't they don't want to upset their employees and no it's not going to really affect marketing and like yeah i kind of want some training and it's not you know for them it's it's just different, right? Like they're. Well, make the case, Andy, for the Mariners, get specific.
7:55Why is it an existential moment or is it okay for them to say, ah, we don't have anything to worry about? Uh, I mean, I make the Kate, I mean, in my opinion, I really wanted to call the book, the holy shit moment. The first chapter is called the holy shit moment in the podcast. I talk a lot about the holy shit moment. What is this? what is an AI first CEO? Because I think an AI first CEO is different than, it has different skills and succeeds in different ways than the CEO of five years ago, 10 years ago. And it's the ones that have had the AI holy shit moment and it's like, it is weight. I mean, I think that this, the book can be summarized if you were trying to take away from the book is, holy cow this is an era of advancement kind of like we've been through before in the industrialization era etc but this is going to happen in such a compressed time and it is now it's the next two to three years and if you're not on the bus you're behind so the case for the mariners would be this is going to affect every aspect of the way in which your fan base decide whether or not to attend a baseball game, if they do decide to attend a baseball game, their entire customer experience is going to be affected by their interaction.
9:20And there's an opportunity to personalize the experience for the type of fan that they are in ways that have never before been possible. You should start experimenting with AI and changing the way in which that customer experience, the way in which customers experience the marriage. So this word experimenting is a word that we hear a lot. And when you talk about playbook or use the word playbook, that the book is a playbook, can you talk for a second about what are the mechanisms? We understand the value of experimentation broadly in innovation, even pre-AI. What does it look like to create mechanisms for experimentation, permissions, resourcing, et cetera, to how do you define success?
10:01What are you measuring, et cetera, et cetera? In the book, we talk about this from the perspective of kind of a boring word, but governance. So you don't, it's funny, Andy and I are not big on like committees and bureaucracy and policies and governance. Those are not words that particularly my friend Andy likes, and I don't like them either. He doesn't strike me as a governance evangelist, yes. No, but that can't cross that quickly, Jeremy. I'm a little slow. I'm a little slow. But one of the things we realized in writing the book and talking to everybody was that, wow, and this is such a, we've never had this thing called intelligence as a service.
10:49Like it's such a weird concept because it's like the closest thing we ever had to our human beings. And so if you, the more that we realize that this is, this is like spinning up in some way, human beings to like help you. How do you make sure that you're like, you would never just really nilly just hire people with no job descriptions and no, no management. And like all of a sudden governance becomes like critical, like in a world. However, when it comes to using AI, you can't just have, you don't want to, there's both defensive and offensive. On a defensive side, you just don't want people running around with chickens with their head cut off, like doing stuff that's going to give up secure information.
11:32like there's no actual like learnings that are being sort of tracked and organized and sort of push yourself forward and on the other hand you don't want to be like so fearful and so disorganized that you're like missing out on how fast things are moving how you could actually totally reinvent and improve speed of decision making quality of decision making improve customer experiences improve marketing effectiveness like so how do you balance that and we realize like yeah you need A company needs, for lack of a better analogy, a vehicle to sort of put the company in and take them to the promised land here at a speed and in a way that makes sense, but is also smart.
12:11And so we realized, oh, yeah, you got to have like a task force or a council or a champion, AI champions team that is actually keeping up with this stuff and actually can think, can actually, when GPT-5 comes out last Thursday and play with it and can have an intelligent conversation about, oh, look, it does this better. but this is worse. And I wonder if this is a good opportunity to use Gemini instead. And where are we on our AI use policy around Gemini instead of chat QPT team? And what about this agent thing that just came out on QPT5? Oh, is this smart to connect to our data? But yet we want to experiment with agents in other ways.
12:54If you ask a regular person who's not AI proficient, that's not keeping up with this stuff, like that just is like what goes right over their head. And so you need a group of people that understand the business you're in, understand that what you're trying to achieve, understand your customers, really understand your customers, understand your customer experience and like your brand and your business model, but also understand AI enough that they can, they can connect those dots and sort of make sure that you have a responsible, but yet proactive way of adopting AI. And so experimenting in that context from that group makes all the sense in the world.
13:32It's like Andy's always good at talking about comparing science labs in science to businesses. And you need a lab that you could play with these things and experiment and learn that's responsible. Can I just say a little bit on the lab thing? Because one of the things that, I think there's two types of organizations. there's the ones that are kind of just getting started they're getting the play group they're setting up like the champion they have like they're following the playbook they should read the book then I think that there are people who have kind of been doing a lot of that stuff and they are starting to kind of like understand some of the subtleties of AI and organization and so they might say hey as I'm doing this I'm realizing that the organizational structure they have right now might not be the one that should be there once we kind of like really starting to use AI and so I'll give you an example maybe you can use that I had somebody call me the other day he's the CEO of a big company and he said I really need somebody to help me do social media that knows a lot about AI and I kind of like was struggling a little bit coming up with a name for him until I kind of realized that it isn't really just somebody who can use MidJourney that he was asking for he was asking for somebody who could help him kind of re-architecture what marketing looks like in an age of AI which is not a social media manager which is something different which would have the issue that if that reported into the normal CMO, kind of like organization structure, probably would fail because it wasn't just about adding another head count.
14:58It's about rethinking basically how you were doing the day-to-day work. And so I guess the question is, the more advanced that you get with the organizations that you advise and what you see, how much do you think that we need to re-architecture some of the organizational design? Or do you think that we can basically just redo the plumbing with AI? I mean, this goes right at the heart of Innovator's Dilemma. I'm a big believer that AI, the speed of the advancement of AI absolutely is going to change the structure of our worlds, the businesses and our lives. And so the notion that we're going to have marketing departments that look like the way they look like today in two years is, uh, it's why you should have a holy shit moment and get on it because it's going to look totally different.
15:51again the the things you know you i think you i'm sure you guys saw you saw the kelsey ad that played during the nba finals i mean the notion that one guy did that in less than two days is they add so what are the what are the the ad that ad is incredible if you haven't seen it and you're listening to this check out the kelsey ad type in kelsey nba finals and you'll find it what are the skills that are required to do that there's like a there's a visioning of the output there's skills with the AI tools that, and then there's rapid, rapid iteration. And that I find, I struggle with this rapid iteration skill.
16:31Cause you like, you just got to keep trying it and trying it. And, oh, you know, and, and we were, Adam and I were talking this morning, when you try it the first time, it's non-deterministic. The second time you do it, it's different. Totally. Even the same thing. That there's a, there's an impulse there. So I think that organization structures within companies of existing companies, it's why the Ethan Mollich chapter, the last chapter in the book, I think is, it's why we did an epilogue to the book, because we realized that Ethan and his, he was telling us in that chapter when we did that interview, it was like, oh guys, your playbook's really nice and all, but it's for, like, it's kind of out of date and it doesn't really, it's not, you're not pushing business leaders far enough into the future.
17:16it's going to be out of date on the day the book is published. And we, you know, we got off the call and we're like, were we just chastised by Ethan? And we were, and he was kind of right. And it's because he was saying that like, you need to be thinking about the next month. When he chastised us, I don't even know like whether, certainly VO3 wasn't out. And I don't know that that O3, the reasoning models were out. Absolutely not. And we talked to them in September or around then. They didn't come out until December. So long story short, organizational structures are going to change radically.
17:53I do believe there's going to be a bunch of small five, eight person teams doing the work that 200 person teams do today. So would you start that already? I mean, there seem to be there's two ways of thinking about what you do today. If you're the chief innovation officer or whatever the title is that's responsible for this. then I either say, I'm going to try to upgrade everybody. I'm really going to like, just make myself kind of like AI first, right? The other one, which you've seen some people doing is what I think of as replatforming, where they kind of go, this won't work. I'll have to basically rebuild, but kind of rebuild on AI stack on AI philosophy.
18:32And so I chopped the team basically down and then I built from that. Where are you in those news? Henrik, remember what we heard from John Waldman? I mean, he, one of our previous guests, CEO of Homebase, he mentioned how his board was instructing him to be hiring unemployed people for two reasons. One, they have the bandwidth to be re-skilling. Two, they have categorical evidence from the market that their current skill set's insufficient. And I think it speaks a little bit to Henrik's question about how much effort should we invest in, call it upskilling, re-skilling, et cetera, versus where do we just need to start over?
19:11So let me give you a couple of thoughts on this. So number one is we wrote about this in the book a little bit, and I, I'm going to draw some parallels to when I was named chief digital officer at Starbucks and there was really no such title. And we talked about this in the book and I'm not comparing the AI first wave necessarily to the mobile first wave that I was sort of dealing with on the backs of the digital, you know, computerization and internet wave one. I think this is different. I think this is more of a code red, as you said. And I think we make that point in the book. And I think that if you tried to just, I personally don't think a code red means burn it all down and reorganize right now.
19:59I actually think that you could, like that would be ambitious. But I think that you're going to, you might find yourself in sort of a clarinet situation where you have that instinct to do, and I don't know the clarinet details, but I've just fallen what I've read. And I actually really admire a lot of the stuff he was saying, but I feel like if you, you'll end up cartwheeling over the finish line, if you call a code red and you don't really understand that like, it takes time for an organization, particularly any sort of sizable organization to, um, rewire itself. And then, you know, you're running a real business and, you know, it's easy to sort of say something like, Oh, we need to like burn it all down and rewire everything.
20:37I do think you will eventually need to do that on some level. But it's like we said before, you have to like give yourself a way to do that. And so I actually, what we say now, what we would recommend is yes, you call a code red, you call a code red from your CEO that like, this is, this is different. This is going to change much faster and come at us much faster than any other technology. And it's different than any other technology. And we're going to have to start rewiring things. But if we try to like do that across the board right now, we would end up in a situation where like you just wouldn't be able to get your daily work done, even if it was augmented by AI.
21:15So you got to like find a pace and an arc to do that. We recommend call a code red from the top, so to speak. Get people AI literate across the organization, make, you know, create academies, create a license for people to use AI in a safe, secure, responsible way. and like get a core group of people that are going to really invest themselves in like staying at the edge of this stuff that are going to like take, kind of recommend how your organization should make these changes. I don't think it's like, for example, unless your head of HR or your CEO is like that AI proficient, like who's going to make the decision to like rewire everything?
21:56You could say, well, the functional leader in marketing is going to do it. Like, okay, are she or he, are they on that council? Are they up to speed? Like, no, they do need to do that in the next few years, which is pretty amazing that I'm saying that. But I just would say be careful about, like, declaring things and just because you could end up in a situation where you have to, like, you know, roll it back on some levels. And I'm a big fan of, like, doing it in a somewhat organized, even if urgent manner. So you're a CEO. Say you declare a code red. And I'm speaking right now from an observation I have with a multinational enterprise that has appointed an AI committee or council.
22:35I think you said task force, right? They've got champions. My observation is, unless it's delicately managed in terms of permissions, expectations, accountability, et cetera, the task force can actually just become the bottleneck. It's, oh, people are waiting. Well, let's see what the task force says about X, Y, Z. How do you make sure from a kind of structural perspective, going back to Henry's question about org design, how do you structure the task force so that they accelerate your learning rather than rate limit your learning? Yeah, the task force and the AI policy should accomplish what you just said.
23:13It should accelerate. So if you think about how to implement our playbook, and I'll explain in a, because who knows how to implement our playbook and let's explain it. You have to sort of give permission to the organization to use generative AI. I've crossed the board. I'm talking about everybody in some level. Like, don't just like roll out a co-pilot chat button and don't tell anyone what to do with it and how it can be used. And that's why I say that it starts with the CEO. CEO should be saying to the whole organization, like, This is a powerful new technology. I encourage you all to use it.
23:47We have a policy. We have a task force to help you. Like they're there to help you think about prioritization of pilots and, you know, any sort of office hours and training that you need and thoughts. And they're going to administrate our policy. If you have any questions about, you know, can you use Notebook Limb? Can we use Gemini? What's our core tool? Like, how do I learn more about this? How do I get more involved? Like the task force is there to facilitate, not be a gatekeeper. And it has to be a message from the top. that everybody should be using this and playing with it in a responsible way.
24:17And then the task force is there as sort of an engine to make sure people can answer their questions, to make sure they're not just like all over the place. And then that's sort of the combination that allows an organization, if it wants to, to have everybody moving forward. It's sort of a delicate needle to be thread, but the task force is not a gatekeeper. And then in the use policy, you could say the same thing. Well, use policy is going to tell me what I can I can't do. That's why you got to craft a smart use policy. But a good counsel, a good AI leader within the organization is going to make sure that all of this has the opposite effect, that it's actually meant for everybody to be freely using it.
24:56I mean, Andy and I, when we talk to leaders, the first question we ask is, how often are you using AI? Which AI are you using? How many times a day are you using it? When we start talking to them, have you run that through AI? I actually think one of the core questions that will happen all the time in the next year, that's a sign of an AI-first organization, is when a leader says to their team, I just expect that you will have run this through Claude, Rock, Gemini, Chachabuti at a good thinking, reasoning level before you've come to me with some thoughts or an answer to a question. Right. Failure to leverage every tool available to you.
25:37will be considered professional malpractice. On the playbook, if you were just like listing down the chapters, is that like feasible to do just to kind of give people listening in kind of like what are the elements and so they can kind of go either, I already thought about that or this is something I need to read up on? The arc of the book is, it starts out with Andy and I talking about our meeting with Sam Altman and our holy shit moment. And as Andy mentioned, it was kind of the title of the intro chapter is called The Holy Ship Moment, which was that was all about like, wow, these guys are going after AGI, artificial general intelligence.
26:16They're moving much faster than we thought with a goal to have this kind of concept of very powerful AI in the next five years. And we didn't realize how fast their ambitions were. And then that led us to a chapter with Reid Hoffman where he was explaining, you know, the Iron Man suit effect of this. So this is about like micro use cases, individual use cases, 10xing the individual functional leader. Then we talked to Bill Gates about productivity and really about if you're going to get that level of productivity, it's not just going to be quantitative. It's going to be qualitative and what the two dimensions of productivity between qualitative and quantitative and how important it is to understand that.
26:59And then we talked to Mustafa Suleiman, who was not yet the CEO of Microsoft, but was coming off of his time from being a Google DeepMind co-founder and really thinking about what does the next three or four years look like in terms of the speed of change of this technology and how it would affect, like we just talked about, how will it affect marketing? How will it affect org design? How will it affect the attention economy? And so we went, that was sort of the beginning arc of the book. And then we stopped in the middle of the book and we said, wait a minute. Because this is an unusual book.
27:35It was not, we didn't have an outline. We just wanted to literally document our learning journey. And then we stopped and we had a chapter where we just said, let's put this all together and start talking to business leaders about how they're using it. And so then we started talking to like the CEO of Suzy.com. We talked to Saul Kahn from the Kahn Academy. like and we talked to the head of ai at moderna who had led an absolutely like literally a casebook um textbook case study on how to adopt our ai threat they have 80 percent adopt you know every day was that bryce you were talking to bryce chalama yeah i was such a huge fan of his yeah so we so we talked to bryce we talked to salk on we talked to matt britain from susie all in an effort like who are the leaders out there that get it and that have like actually succeeded at infusing AI into the culture, into the mindset.
28:27And they were those AI first leaders. And then based on all that arc, we ended up talking about the playbook and then ended up talking to Ethan Mollick and said, you know, how do we do? And as Andy said, he said, you didn't go far enough. Can I ask a kind of odd question? You know, when sometimes you talk to people, there's a thing that you feel they don't say. Like, did you have like a sense after talking to all these very smart people who is probably as kind of like aware of what's going on as anybody else. What was the unspoken thing? I have an answer to that because as we've done the book tour, we've been asked a similar question.
29:08Safety. Nobody talks about safety. It's not in all of those conversations. And it's easy. Like I fall into this as well. Like I'm enthralled by the pace, the capability set of what AI enables, the organizational structure, all of that stuff. Super interesting intellectual fodder, but safety. Do you think you can do both? I mean, I'm going to ask because I'm currently in Europe where everybody's trying to regulate themselves into innovation, right? And the U.S. obviously is amazing because you guys are literally the Wild West people that are like, we'll figure it out. Um, like how do you fire aim?
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29:50Yeah. How, how is it kind of like, just like an impossible challenge to say, we'd like to move as fast and try to get to AGI, but also on safety. Is that, is that doable? You know, I, um, I think early on a number of people recognized that this was not technology. This was alien intelligence and the capability set of the tool that is powered by technology, I guess, and that the power of the tool conceivably represents an existential threat to humanity. And so I don't know what you do with that. Humans aren't great. Like the capitalist system is doing what it does, which is a bunch of very smart, hungry business people at probably six or eight companies are attracting capital and deploying it and going as fast as they can.
30:44One thing that might stop it, I guess, I'll say it as a statement, but I mean, as a question. So I had an obit in Washington Post yesterday about what I thought was kind of like a positive use of AI, right? Like as we talked about in your podcast, like how do you do more precise access to entrepreneurship with AI? And the comments, there was like 600 comments. And most of them didn't seem to have like read the piece. But you could just feel like an immense anger and immense fear, right? It was all about, yes, but it's going to polarize all wealth. Yes, it's going to like, it's just very worried.
31:20And then I see like the Duolingo people put something on LinkedIn where they are excited about something done with AI. And the comment track is just like, I'm canceling. This is just because you want to make more money. You don't care about people. there's like a lot of like what i says is like anger and deep fear and then i think there are people like us that do these podcasts where we talk about all this stuff and we're like yeah but it's awesome um do you think that that kind of like what i would see as brewing resistance or brewing fear or brewing kind of like um attention to kind of things that go wrong might in some way kind of create that kind of like break effect to all this?
32:06Or will that just be kind of like pushed to the side and people go like, let's just go, go, go. I think it'll be pushed to the side. I mean, it'll drew up and be chaos. And it'll be like, you know, I'm sure you listened to the Diary of CEO, that recent part. I thought that was an excellent podcast in which he talked about the five to 15 years of chaos and then tried to make the case for utopian i'm so i'm sort of on that like you know like we're in it it's the bus is left the station if you're not engaging with ai your business you're behind if you're not having a code or having a holy shit moment you're not paying attention and i think there's gonna be massive of resistance and chaos.
32:53And meanwhile, the technology will advance. Did you guys see there was a Harvard report that just came out where they studied the human evaluation of work? And it was the same underlying work. And then the question was whether an evaluator thought that it was human-generated or human plus AI-generated. And the worst evaluations were given to human and AI generated work by the least likely to adopt the AI. So, which is to say, the less likely someone is to adopt AI, the more harsh they are to be towards AI adopters. And in many cases, these are the middle managers and they were harshest, by the way, towards women and minorities.
33:36When they perceived that a woman was using AI, they were much harsher. When they perceived that a minority was using AI, they were using it much harsher. or sorry, they evaluated the same underlying output much more harshly and questioned the competence. They knew who was making the output. That was the experimental condition, same output, but then they told the evaluator, this is human only output by a man. This is human only output by a woman. This is human and AI output by a man, human and AI by a woman. And consistently, the least experienced people were who often are in positions of giving promotions, of approving work, et cetera, were most harsh towards AI.
34:16They were testing for a bias in this AI context, AI helping context or AI assisted context. Yeah. And it doesn't surprise me in the sense of that's been going on before AI and now with AI, to your point. But getting back to, I agree with Andy that I do think we can draw comparisons to the internet in some way so like when the internet really i mean we're old enough to remember all this stuff at least i am and i'm not you know the internet caused a lot of problems causes a lot of problems like today like social media and fraud and scams and um so there's this weird there's this weird thing that we've experienced and it's gonna it just gets more powerful right computers to internet to cloud mobile to now ai where like it's the same mixture of like a you can't put the genie back in the bottle the it it causes it there's real concerns right andy's exactly right like the whole time we were talking to folks we'd get done with the discussion and we'd say yeah there was really not a discussion of like safety um or like why are they building these things that they don't know what's going to happen and there just needs to be i mean talking about society you're talking about even just like displacement and disruption and there's not a ton of so that so in other words this industry is happening and these tools are out there and i you know i do think it's similar to the internet in the sense of like yeah there's there's a dark side to this and there's a there's problems and we need to be doing more do you feel that we this says very many we talk about safety we often talk about the foundational models um and then i'll give you a little backstory i was part of like the early social web also right and so i remember being at social food camp you know like where everybody who was building social platforms were and all the founders of companies that now then became well known were kind of hanging out and there was not a lot of discussion about safety there because we're taking pictures of our lunch and putting them you know in a feed and we were like what's the worst that can happen then obviously you know a whole generation's mental health kind of got washed washed away in the process when we talk about safety and and you talk to all these ceos obviously they can't change the foundational models but i wonder if there's something they can do to address the element of safety just in the way that they are conducting themselves with the use every day in their organizations?
36:59CEOs of the labs or CEOs of everyday companies? No, I don't have an answer for it. So like, you know, I'm not sure that there is, but I just want to, we talk about safety and then we kind of like look at these eight companies and go like, you should fix it. And then like in Europe, we look at the government saying, well, you should fix it. You know, like I wonder like if there is the introspective. Is there safety on the edge as opposed to the center? Yeah. What would we do there? Right. You know, is it our responsibility? We early asked the question, like should we basically just kind of find new people that if the old ones don't want to be upgraded is part of the safety is to say, well, actually, no, it's your responsibility to kind of like make sure that people get along on the ride.
37:38You know, like those kinds of questions. I mean, I just, I don't hear them that often. So it's a good question. I haven't thought about it. My knee jerk reaction to it is that really it is about the large language models. It's not about the user at the end, the CEO and the policies, et cetera. It's about the capability set of the set of tools. And really the debate is about open source versus closed. And where does ethics and safety fall in the responsibility? And you just today, because AI is such a profound step forward in terms of its capability set to solve problems that humans can't for the good.
38:22We might actually solve cancer. We might solve Alzheimer's. We might solve fusion. It's being talked about as a potential breakthrough in all of those domains. The underbelly of all of that is that technology could be used for lots of not well-intentioned things. And when you have a debate geopolitical debate about what is intention. And just because the U.S. says one thing in Germany, which are two countries that are closely aligned, it gets really complicated really quickly in the world. Um, and so like open source or closed source is really a challenging question. Um, I think that's actually one that I don't hear a lot of the U.S.
39:10discussing about my co-founder at Autos and co-author of the book, Nicholas. He was in Bhutan last week. and one of the questions you get there like from a group of high schoolers is you know so what do you use oh may I have deep seek like that's like the first question right and then obviously you know he's like you know what do you mean like I use open my eye um I wonder how much of like a lot of like the the world politics also will kind of like then be influenced by the question that you're just posing open source versus close but also just where does the yeah safety is just being tossed. It's not, it's not top of mind.
39:47It's not given the, given what's at stake, the prize that is perceived at stake, um, geopolitically and capital wise, it's safe to be damned. One thing that I would love to revisit is this question about both leadership and organizational structure in regards to the playbook. Um, you mentioned Sam, um, Um, and one of the things that I've wondered about is to what extent is this about AI first versus call it agility for lack of a better word. And the reason I ask that is I think AI first has certain connotation, but when I talk to my friends at open AI, for example, the hallmarks of their culture aren't, they are using AI for everything.
40:30Everyone's using AI for everything. So that's a non-negotiable as Brad Anderson said on the podcast recently, every person in every function every day. Okay, granted. But when I look at the way they are making decisions at OpenAI, it's about being clear about one-way versus two-way doors. You know, it's classic Amazon kind of thought process, right? They're clear on meetings must be valuable. They're clear there's no email. They do everything via Slack. There's literally zero email in the company, except with outsiders, right? And so to me, those aren't necessarily AI solutions. They're organizational decisions around agility, velocity, pushing decision-making down, etc.
41:14How much of this is AI catalyzing the necessity of agility versus AI bringing in a new concern, consideration, etc.? I mean, I think I understand your question. I'll try for a second, and Andy jump in, we wrestled with the title AI first because we were purposely trying to make, we asked the question, like, what does AI first even mean before we knew the answer? And then we ended up with an answer that it's about human in the middle. Like we, it's, it's augment, it's 10Xing, it's the human, it's the Iron Man suit for the human. It's still Tony Stark in the Iron Man suit. And at the end of the day, that's how I think of it.
41:58I think Andy and I think of it is like it's still it is about like you're you're sort of going through your day and now you have this like always on augmentation tool that's at your disposal you know you're going to use it a lot and you're going to actually rewire the way that you make decisions um and it's going to get weird because we talk about this in the book like when agents truly we don't really have we have agentic things that we do with ai now like even thinking models are somewhat agentic just on their face. And then you've got these things called agents, but that's a really misused and overly used term.
42:34And, but at some point there's going to be agents that are like trusted, autonomous, capable, maybe even super intelligent agents. And I don't think that that's a world that's 20 years away. I think it's, it's much closer than that. And, and so that's a different consideration, but for now we don't really have that. This is an augmentation, like an incredible augmentation tool and you can automate workflows and you can do things, but it's humans that are being augmented. So, and you know, that's a, I don't know if that fully answers your question, but that's how we see things for the next couple of years.
43:09But people need to, we do think that, I would recommend that people in the workforce and leaders in particular, like realize that their people probably should be using it more, but it's to achieve what the people are trying to achieve, right? It's still human powered. And the question is like, how much augmentation, how much 10Xing happens, you know, for now? I mean, I do think that that spectrum, it's like science fiction, like that spectrum is going to, it is already starting to change. Whereas like, how much do you still let the AI do things? How much do you rely on the AI? And I think it's human powered still.
43:51Well, I think there's a lot there, Adam, just in terms of decision-making, if you think about turns in an organization, you're my boss, I propose something to you, you've got to review it, you come back. If we're both augmented and I say, hey, Chad GPT, you know everything about my boss, Adam, you know how he makes decisions. Will you recast this email in a way that's most likely to be persuasive to him, right? And you have an AI that's trained to evaluate Jeremy's proposals. You can imagine if, even if we just cut the turns in half, we doubled decision velocity, right and so there even in a world that's where it's only humans being augmented to interact with each other i agree you see the organization accelerate dramatically that's right yeah andy and i talk about it as like you ever see that movie limitless with bradley cooper like it's like i still think that analogy holds like is everybody just has like a limit of us like but of everybody not just one character in the movie but like what happens when you end up making better decisions faster.
44:54And they say, you think about it, like in most organizations, our jobs are like, we're just like decision-making agents to mix them, to mix the metaphor. I was slightly, I think it's related. I think it's, it addresses this question, but I was watching some YouTube clip. I, you know, I hear, if you've ever heard of YouTube, it's this great new platform. Amazing. What's the URL? Well, on YouTube, it was that Tom Brady was on and he was like talking to a soccer team and he was describing how every day in practice he would do the two minute drill and he would be like, I'm going to treat this practice like it's the Super Bowl.
45:37And he would do the two minute drill and he'd like, you know, they'd score and he'd be like, he'd jump up and down and he got his whole team to treat practice as if it was, you know, that Super Bowl moment. And I think that that's very relevant to this conversation. That's brilliant. I absolutely agree. Folks don't really see all of the opportunities there are for snaps, as you're saying. Yes. Every email exchange is a snap. Are you treating it like a Super Bowl moment or are you just casting it off? Yeah. It'd be interesting. I've always wondered, this is kind of a tangent, but I've always wondered, what if everything I did in a course of the week, I forced myself to use AI for every single thing I did, which would be really weird because I don't know how you do that.
46:29But like, but it'd be interesting because I almost want to try it as an experiment. I have a feeling I would find myself in a weird but better place at the end of the week, which is really weird to say. But it, but you'd have to force yourself. It's completely unnatural to do that. And, and yet it would be me prompting and me iterating. So it's still me. Like I, you know, we're not, again, until the agents become autonomous, truly autonomous, like it's still you prompting and still you interacting and you thinking about how you want to react and how you want to receive the information. So I, you know, anyways, I think that, that Tom Brady thing is a good example.
47:13I do think that that. And I think that's the, like, it's interesting. We've ended on this podcast on a point, which is like, I think in some ways, if that concept, which sounds so weird and almost overly like artificial and inhuman and all that kind of stuff is the point we want to get across in the book that is like, you can choose not to do that or it's okay, but just know that if you did choose to do that, you would probably make better decisions faster all week. And if your whole organization was doing that on a compounded basis every day, every month, like where is your company going to be?
47:49Right. If that was really, we actually know the answer. Like there's been studies done by Harvard and BCG and Wharton that say, you're going to be like 50 % faster and 50 % higher quality at today's models. And that's like, that's insane. If you could get 10%, Michael Dell was on a podcast that Andy sent me. BG Squared. Yeah, BG Squared. And he was saying the same thing. He's like, look, I'll take 10%. If I can get 10 % higher quality and faster decision-making. He probably read the book. He probably read the book. For sure. I have one last question, and then we'll let you go because we know we're running out of time.
48:32But I know, Adam, that you convinced Andy to write a new book. But really what I'm interested in is what is the kind of like the next thing you guys are pondering about? Like what's the thing that you might not have the answer for, but where you just have an insane amount of interestingness? I have two areas that I'll, one is the impact of this massive investment and hyperscaling to the overall economy globally and specifically in the U.S. And that means what does really happen to labor industry by industry, job title by job title, consumer respect, like the impact is there's like a massive gold rush that's being poured into the economy.
49:19So there's that. That's one topic. The second topic is the fundamental changing. I mean, in many ways, your question about organizational structure, really fascinating to me. But what actually happens to the fabric of competition? I compare a lot of what the competition in business in general, I compare a lot of what's happened with AI to suddenly, at least in the US, you know, there's 20 to 40 tools for every industry, every application. And it's like there's competition has been unleashed in massive ways, which hurts margins. And yet, like, what happens as a result of that? So I think business fundamentally changed, and I'm fascinated by that.
50:06That's fascinating. Yeah, the only thing I'd add is, and Andy and I have also, we've been talking about that. We've also been talking about vibe coding. And it's interesting. It's, you know, Andre Karpathy sort of coined that term. It's been around for six months or whatever now. but there's something about what's happening with the coding abilities for non-technical people in the last month between lovable and tpt5's release in the highlighted vibe coding andy and i as we started to try vibe coding some things it actually opened our mind that like it's vibe coding it takes that problem that ai problem solving we just said to like another dimension that uh that's another thing we're fascinated by like pulling the thread on that to be like i think these these sort of science fiction ideas of like organizations not just like rolling their own enterprise software but like i'm not a software engineer but like taking a software engineering approach to non-software problems and actually creating code to sort of help you with those problems.
51:17If you can combine a business leader's mind with functional expertise with software development capabilities, suddenly like that's a really weird and interesting combination for propelling an organization forward. And Andy and I are like, we're trying to get our heads around that, which is like a whole other, it's like in the series three body problem. I don't know if you've ever watched those books and that movie but like the first series is about aliens you know maybe coming to earth or whatever but then if you hear about the second third books are about you're like oh my god like it it went in a really weird place around things and i think that's where the sequel to ai first is going to be probably if it was ever literally or figuratively written we're going to be about how organizations they don't just like change their org design they don't have to say i first but like they're just completely different animals in a way because of the capabilities of ai yeah There's so much.
52:11It's impossible to overstate. I mean, talk about governance headache or safety, right? But I mean, I told Henrik this story the other day. I was working with a company in Latin America and they had like 10 ideas. We started with, you know, I'm the idea guy, right? So you start with a thousand ideas, you get down to 10. And before lunch, which is like 3 p.m. there, you know, of course, I said, hey, back in the envelope calculation, how much time and budget Do you need to pull these ideas? Not scale across thousands of locations, just like prototype. And the mode response, any guesses? It's like 50K, eight weeks.
52:49That's what everybody said. Roughly 50K in eight weeks. While they were at lunch, me and my partner built one of the ideas. And they come back from lunch. We're like, did you mean like this? And you just see, it's like, there's the real time blowing of minds. and then the CIO going, oh no, now you've really screwed me because now they're going to expect. And you think about every manager who hears a team say it's going to take 10 weeks and they go, great. You know, if a manager doesn't know, they should say absolutely unacceptable. I'll give you 10 hours. Right. Then they keep talking about velocity.
53:23Right. Then they keep saying, great, 10 weeks. Let me know when you got a prototype. Right. Yeah, that's right, Jeremy. I know we're That's a great story. Yeah. You just said it's interesting because we, Andy and I, in the book AI first, we're all about like, wow, like the Iron Man suit, the 10X thing that Reid Hoffman talks about. This is better decisions faster. But what happens when the execution of the better decision is also at that speed? Like that's the part, like you're saying, that's the part that we're trying to get our head around and is the next chapter. Yeah, that's awesome. I think that's a great place to stop the pot.
53:59Really, really appreciate having you on. Okay, Jeremy, interesting conversation, huh? I thought so. You know, I'm still, my head's kind of spinning there at the end. We were talking about everybody's got a limitless pill. Yeah. And I think for all of the hype around agents and for all the hype around, you know, scaling, you know, productivity, stuff like that, the kind of thought exercise we went through at the end, right? Adam's my boss. I'm working for Adam. if I just am able to communicate better with him and if he's just better able to manage me, understand or just thinking about the decision velocity in that kind of paired relationship, if you extrapolate it, it doesn't take very much extrapolation to imagine.
54:43It's not just like a 10 % better organization. It's a totally different organization. I want to listen to the BG2 podcast with Michael Delks, it sounds like he was saying something similar. But to me, it's really profound to think about truly being AI first, truly being augmented. And after we hit pause on the recording, we're talking about maybe we do an AI first challenge where we and our listeners say, hey, all week long, we're going to invite AI into every part of our week. We don't even know what that means, really. But even just to shift the frame from, you know, what is AI a fit for to starting point is we're working with AI for everything and finding ways to do it and then reflecting on that later.
55:27I think it's a really powerful reframe, actually. So, yeah, I think it's interesting when, you know, when you suddenly figure out it breaks, you know, like I was, I'm not sure we talked about it, but like I was wearing one of those little dongles, you know, that records everything. and uh you know i brought over around the family and my wife looked at it and go like what's that and i'm like you know it's an AI device i'm testing i'm recording everything she's like no you're not and it started like a really interesting kind of conversation about like in her view for example even though this is just for my own use she thought that was worse than taking a picture and putting it on social like that like the the boundary that was broken there and you know for me like since i was just using it for myself you know like i'm like you know it's just me and my ai friend right so uh right so i think it's interesting well the interesting with that experiments is not only obviously what's going to yield and kind of like it's active way what you can use it for but also like where you find out where you definitely shouldn't use it um the thing that i really kind of like crystallized for me was i saw a shopify kind of um head of design or something like that basically says something to extend like don't ever show me like figma files or anything i only want to see prototypes i only want to see basically you where you mucked up a solution for something that you're debating with me and many other points and as and that was kind of like i think the the output from my brain of this conversation of like are we asking our organization to implement ai because we're trying to implement new technology or are we trying to really create a new type of behavior a sense of resourcefulness or a sense of entrepreneurship amongst the people where organizations have more agency and they are more kind of like they you know they go further in the chain of thinking about something and then executing on it and I think what was interesting with this kind of example like I don't want to see and I don't want to see a text I want to see a picture I don't want to see a picture I want to see a presentation I want to see a presentation you don't want to see a prototype.
57:35Prototyping is kind of like now a kind of ability that anybody can actually do. And that was just not the case even like a year ago. You know, this, this is going to, I think that I'm predicting folks are going to enjoy this conversation a lot because you don't, you don't know this Henry, but we're going to riff here for another minute or two. Because one thing I've been thinking about is this idea of low-res prototyping. And now you can actually high-res prototype as quickly as you can low-res prototype, right? It's easy. In Replit, you can build a working app as quickly as you could build a crappy, you know, construction paper pipe in your version, right?
58:10And at Stanford for years, we've been teaching students the merits and values of low resolution prototyping. One reason is speed, okay? And now you can get high resolution at the same speed, maybe even greater. The other thing which I would be fascinated to dig into, which I don't think is addressed by, call it the replets of the world, is your own investment in your solution. When you are working with crappy materials like construction paper, your ego doesn't get attached. Whenever something looks nice, it also changes the customer's perception or the user's perception, right? If it looks nice, I'm talking about colors and button placement.
58:50Whereas if it looks crappy, of course, I'm talking about the concept because you couldn't possibly want to launch this, right? And so all of a sudden we're kind of anchoring differently in these rapid prototyping tools, I think will have a different impact on the user, which probably is good because the more realistic or believable the decision, the higher quality of the data point. So I like that. But from a user or from a designer perspective or an innovator perspective, I think part of the challenge is it's really hard to throw away because it looks nice. And I'll give you one simple example.
59:20One thing I know to be true teaching hundreds of professionals now how to use tools like Replit is that sometimes the best thing to do is open a new window and drop the PRDN and just start over. Because for whatever reason, Replit went down a weird rabbit hole. But what I've noticed is the cognitive load on a human when they see all the work. Yeah, granted, it only took Replit 10 minutes to do this, but it feels like four weeks worth of work. trying to scrap that window feels like throwing away four weeks worth of work not 10 minutes okay i have two things so there's like there's like a weird attachment there anyway i so i'm just i'm kind of riffing hit you know but come on there's two no i'm i'm hitting the riff because i'm into it there's two thoughts one is there is this kind of like um the promiscuousness of making which is if you talk to people who are great at um using people on upwork what they do is they hire six people to do the same work and then they just take the best part and they continue with that person they're kind of like disposable in the use which is kind of like weird for most people because they paid somebody to do some work i think what you're saying there for me is quite profound and has helped me as an entrepreneur a lot it's like i'm pretty promiscuous when it comes to kind of like concept i start two or three things at the same time and if it doesn't work i don't dig in harder i basically go oh it didn't work and then i kind of go to the next thing i'm very inspired by my wife she used this term she's a medical biologist she used this term like it was non-viable like it's not emotional it just didn't work next thing right um the other thing which i think is interesting that you mentioned was that this thing what happens when suddenly you can prototype in high fidelity and you're making the point that it used to be easy for people to basically do something that was kind of shitty looking because then people would focus on the concept i think the flip side of what you're saying though is that now that everything looks like the final product the idea suddenly actually matters right so people now has vo3 and you see these amazing produced videos and you go like yeah but it's not funny like it's not interesting it didn't make me feel anything.
1:01:34It basically was like you prompted something that was not a good concept. Didn't have an insight. The idea is more important than ever. The idea is more important than ever. That is so fascinating also, right? And the same thing, a lot of the work that I do now where I do product work is that I used to do the same thing. You know, I remember my first, in the start of my career, I would use like balsamic mock-up or like I would mock up stuff like in these kind of like wireframe-y kind of ways. Now, you know, I use, you know, whatever, GBT-5 or Replit. and I basically built whatever I want and then I give it to an engineer and saying, okay, I know this is like not safe or anything, but like this is roughly what I was looking to do.
1:02:09And then obviously the velocity of then taking that into the code base is much faster than having to kind of explain it to somebody that had to explain it to something that didn't have to code it. But if it's not working, then it's very clear immediately because it just doesn't pop right there when you try to use it. mm-hmm yeah it's it's really you know we talked about a future in this episode and how the future is going to look different how organizations are going to look different when it's technically possible to run that many experiments in parallel you're going to have all sorts of other call it coordination challenges which maybe will be solved by ai but i think folks will only earn the right to have that kind of elevated, abstracted conversation about innovation if they are at the edge of capabilities.
1:02:59Meaning if they're still writing, as we talked with John Waldman about a few weeks ago, right? If they're still writing 20 page PRD docs and reading 20 page PRD docs, they are going to be a hundred times slower. And if they're only building one thing with Replit, they're going to be a hundred times worse than if they're building a hundred and they're happy to scrap the 99 for the one thing that they wouldn't have discovered had they not done a hundred parallel versions, right? But this is that the extrapolating to the exponential in a sense is a wild way to think about product development, innovation management.
1:03:34And it's now more possible than ever because we're no longer constrained. Going back to the beginning of this conversation, actually, we're no longer constrained by our intelligence. The reason you could not make 10 versions of the landing page is because it takes 10 times as much time. Now, it literally takes the same amount of time. To make 10 is to make one. The only limitation is, do you as the innovator know you should make 10? That's the only difference. I'll stop now because we'll soon make the commentary on the podcast. No, no. I mean, folks, hey, how about this? How about the code word?
1:04:10The secret code word this week is Mas Henrik. That's M-A-S-H-E-N-R-I-K. or, uh, what's, what's less, less Henrik. I don't know. I want to know whether people like more of this kind of conversation or less. So whatever the code word you want to use, that tells us whether you want to hear us riffing more or just like get back to the, get back to the guest, you jokers, let us know. That's awesome. As always, as always, thanks for listening to this episode of Beyond the Prompt. I am your host, Jeremy Utley, alongside my co-host Henrik Werdelin, and we are delighted to learn alongside you. Until next time, signing off from Copenhagen in La Honda, California.
1:04:57Bye.
From the publisher
Adam Brotman and Andy Sack sit down with Henrik and Jeremy to unpack their book AI First and the framework they have developed for leaders. They argue that AI is not just another technology wave but a leadership reset that demands new playbooks, new structures and new ways of thinking.
They explain why AI should be seen as an augmentation of human intelligence, an “Ironman suit” for leaders, and how mindset, experimentation and governance are essential to adoption. The conversation also explores organizational redesign, the role of executives in fostering AI literacy and the urgency of adapting quickly as the technology advances.
This episode offers a practical and forward-looking discussion on how leaders can integrate AI across their organizations, build cultures of experimentation and future-proof their businesses in a rapidly changing landscape.
Key Takeaways:
- AI is a leadership reset, not just a technology shift.
Adam and Andy argue that AI demands a new playbook for leaders. It is not simply another tool, like mobile or digital before it, but a force that changes how companies are structured, how decisions are made, and how leaders must think about competition. - AI should be treated as a co-intelligence tool — an “Ironman suit” for leaders.
Instead of replacing humans, AI augments their capabilities. Leaders who embrace AI can make smarter, faster decisions and guide their organizations more effectively. The metaphor of the Ironman suit captures this idea of augmentation rather than substitution. - Culture and experimentation matter more than the tools.
Mindset, governance, and a willingness to experiment are the foundations of becoming AI-first. Adam and Andy stress that companies need structures like AI councils, experimentation frameworks, and a culture that celebrates rapid prototyping in order to integrate AI across the organization. - The urgency is real: companies that delay will fall behind.
Jeremy and Henrik underline this in their closing reflections — businesses cannot treat AI as optional or wait for perfect clarity. The pace of change is accelerating, and organizations that don’t engage now risk losing ground permanently, while those that act can reinvent themselves and secure long-term advantage.
Forum3: Digital Strategy for the AI Era | Forum3
AI First book: AI First Book | Forum3
Andy LinkedIn: Andy Sack | LinkedIn
Adam LinkedIn: Adam Brotman | LinkedIn
00:00 Intro: The Urgency of AI
00:19 Meet the Authors & The Premise of AI First
03:43 Defining an AI-Forward Leader
05:02 Adoption, Resistance & the AI Wake-Up Call
08:01 Why Mindset Matters More Than Tools
09:39 Experimentation, Governance & AI Culture
14:09 Re-architecting Organizations for AI
28:42 Balancing Innovation and Safety
35:45 The Evolution of AI Safety
37:46 Open Source vs. Closed Source Debate
40:07 AI’s Role in Organizational Agility
41:32 Human Augmentation & Co-Intelligence
42:34 The Future of AI and Autonomous Agents
46:14 Prototyping, Vibe Coding & Rapid Innovation
54:02 The Future of Organizational Design & Final Reflections
📜 Read the transcript for this episode: Transcript of The AI Playbook Every Leader Needs: A Chat With Adam Brotman & Andy Sack
For more prompts, tips, and AI tools. Check out our website: https://www.beyondtheprompt.ai/ or follow Jeremy or Henrik on Linkedin:
Henrik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/werdelin
Jeremy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyutley
Show edited by Emma Cecilie Jensen.




