AI First with Adam and Andy

Ahead of next week's launch of Agents Inc., Adam Brotman and Andy Sack invite Forum3 Chief Strategy Officer Rose Kelly onto AI First with Adam and Andy for a special preview episode. The hosts walk through the origin of their second book: a shift in how they were advising clients on agentic organizations that turned into an idea to write the book itself with the help of an AI agent. Adam and Andy...

The media narrative around token maxing and CFO anxiety is creating confusion at the executive level, just as AI is becoming genuinely transformative. Stories about companies blowing through annual token budgets in a quarter have leaders reaching for the brakes. Adam and Andy argue this is exactly backward. The core reframe: AI isn't a line item in your tech stack. It's intelligence as a service....

Most companies approach AI agents as efficiency tools, ways to do the same work faster and cheaper. This episode presents a different model. Forum3 recently deployed a managed agent for a client's independent sales force, and the results challenge that assumption. The agent, delivered entirely through email, acts as a personalized CRM, business analyst, and chief of staff for each sales rep. It pr...

Clay CEO Kareem Amin joins AI First to discuss how Clay evolved from a no-code productivity platform into one of the fastest-growing AI-powered go-to-market companies. He shares the origin of the go-to-market engineer role, how AI transformed sales and customer intelligence workflows, and why Clay was uniquely positioned to capitalize on the rise of large language models. The conversation explores...

Across industries, job postings increasingly require AI experience, but a fundamental mismatch exists between what employers are asking for and how they evaluate it. Adam and Andy tackle this head-on, starting with the hiring manager who knows AI matters but isn't deeply fluent themselves. How do you assess a skill you don't fully possess? The answer, they argue, comes down to asking candidates ab...

As AI investments accelerate across the enterprise, many organizations are simultaneously pursuing workforce reductions and operational restructuring. In this episode of AI First with Adam and Andy , Adam Brotman and Andy Sack examine recent layoffs at major companies including Meta, Coinbase, Oracle, and Block, and discuss what separates strategic AI transformation from simple cost-cutting. The c...

Restaurant leaders have moved past curiosity and into something more unsettling: they understand enough to know AI is powerful, but not enough to know where to start. That fear, shared openly by CEOs at industry conferences, is driving a new wave of urgency around AI strategy. Adam Brotman and Andy Sack break down this understanding gap with real conversations from restaurant C-suites. They introd...

In this episode, Red Robin’s VP and Head of Technology, Deena DePhilips, outlines a pragmatic approach to enterprise AI adoption grounded in leadership alignment and real-world application. Framing AI as a transformative force akin to the internet, she emphasizes that organizations must “lean in and lead,” ensuring AI happens with them, not to them. DePhilips details a “crawl, walk, run” journey,...

Adam Brotman put his OpenClaw agent to work on a real task: identifying small restaurant and cafe concepts for sale, evaluating options, and reaching out to business brokers. The agent moved fast, surfacing viable opportunities and drafting outreach within minutes. It also emailed the wrong person with unapproved information, a concrete example of the autonomy that makes agents powerful and the ov...

In this episode of AI First, Adam Brotman and Andy Sack sit down with Inflection CEO Aaron Bird to unpack the rise of agentic marketing and what it means for business leaders. The conversation explores how AI is evolving from simple Q&A tools into autonomous agents capable of executing complex marketing workflows—from campaign planning to execution—at scale. The discussion introduces a two-pha...

Andy Sack spent a full day managing a complex writing project through Claude Cowork's dispatch feature, directing his AI agent from his phone between coffee meetings. The result: roughly ten times the output he could have produced working alone. Then at step five of six, the agent told him his files didn't exist. This mini episode captures the full arc of working with AI agents: the invigoration o...

AI is making teams more productive. The natural instinct is to cut headcount. But that instinct may be costing leaders the bigger opportunity. Adam Brotman and Andy Sack frame AI productivity as a two-sided decision: the denominator (cost reduction) and the numerator (revenue growth, customer experience, innovation). Most executives default to the denominator without asking whether to pursue both,...

In the first quarter of 2025, Anthropic added what Adam Brotman describes as ""an entire Starbucks of revenue run rate"" in a single quarter, reaching close to $30 billion annualized. That growth, driven by a combination of enterprise API revenue, subscriptions, and a fast-rising consumer base, has put Anthropic on the radar of companies that had previously committed to Copilot, Gemini, or OpenAI....

The AI ecosystem is undergoing rapid realignment as major players - including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon - reshape partnerships and product strategies. This episode unpacks the implications of Microsoft integrating Anthropic’s Claude Cowork into Copilot, signaling a shift toward agent-driven workflows and intensified competition among frontier model labs. While Anthropic has...

In this episode of AI First with Adam and Andy, Zapier CEO Wade Foster breaks down the evolution from traditional automation to agentic systems. He draws a clear distinction between deterministic workflows and AI agents, explaining why both matter and how leading companies can combine them to improve reliability, speed, and scale. Foster shares how Zapier is repositioning for the AI era, from buil...

AI agents are rapidly transforming how consumers interact with the internet, collapsing traditional steps like search, comparison, and decision-making into a single, agent-driven workflow. With a growing majority of consumers already using AI tools, this shift is not incremental, it represents a structural change in digital behavior, where agents increasingly act as the primary interface between u...

In this AI First mini episode, Adam Brotman and Andy Sack explore the real-world implications of AI agents through Adam’s hands-on experience building one with OpenClaw.  They break down what makes an agent different from traditional AI tools, including proactive behavior, memory, computer use, and the ability to operate independently. Adam shares both the excitement and the friction, from complex...

In this episode of AI First with Adam and Andy, Thanx founder and CEO Zach Goldstein explains why loyalty has become a strategic imperative for restaurants navigating the rise of delivery marketplaces like DoorDash and Uber Eats. Goldstein argues that while third-party platforms are now unavoidable for customer acquisition, restaurants must prioritize direct relationships with guests to protect ma...

In this focused mini episode, Adam Brotman and Andy Sack explore how Claude Co-Work is reshaping executive productivity and redefining the future of work. Moving beyond traditional prompt-and-response AI tools, they describe what changes when AI operates directly on your desktop with browser access, document parsing, and step-by-step task execution. Through real examples, from synthesizing board m...

As AI capabilities accelerate at a weekly pace, enterprise leaders face a critical question: how do you choose the right AI tools for your organization without compromising security or governance? In this episode, Andy Sack and Adam Brotman provide a CEO-level playbook for becoming AI-first while navigating existing enterprise technology environments. They argue that this moment requires leadershi...

This episode of AI First with Adam and Andy is an intentional experiment. The script, ideas, and analysis are entirely Adam Brotman and Andy Sack’s own. The on-screen hosts and voice delivery were generated using AI tools as part of a hands-on exploration of what these technologies can and cannot yet do. It is not perfect, and that is precisely the point. In this conversation, Adam and Andy tackle...

As AI enters 2026, many enterprises are still measuring success through narrow efficiency gains and license utilization, while missing the larger opportunity for growth and innovation.  In this episode of AI First with Adam and Andy, Paul Roetzer breaks down why AI transformation is fundamentally a leadership and change management challenge, not a technology rollout. The conversation explores why...

In this mini episode of AI First with Adam and Andy, Adam Brotman and Andy Sack explore the growing conversation around AI agents and why most executives are still waiting for something that is not fully here yet. They explain why coding agents are advancing fastest and how those lessons apply to non-technical leaders across strategy, marketing, operations, and analytics.   Drawing on a hands-on e...

In this inside look from an AI First community call, Keith Fairclough, CIO of Cabi, explains how a direct sales women’s apparel brand built AI literacy across the company before chasing shiny use cases.  He details the executive bootcamp that aligned leadership, the in person training that drove adoption, and the practices that sustained momentum, including weekly office hours and monthly AI compe...

In this episode of AI First with Adam and Andy, Greg Gottesman of Pioneer Square Labs shares hard-earned lessons from nearly three decades as a venture capitalist, founder, and startup studio operator. Greg explains why startups rarely fail due to product or technology challenges, even in today’s AI-driven landscape, and why cost-effective distribution remains the defining constraint for success....