AI First with Adam and Andy

Andy Sack, Adam Brotman, and colleague Rose Kelly unpack a workflow that almost wasn't one. Preparing a board presentation on a complex new initiative, Brotman asked Claude Opus 5.5 to turn a PowerPoint into a video, then pushed it to match the production quality of two reference videos. On its own initiative, the agent searched his email and meeting transcripts, ran external research, and worked...

Andy Sack and Adam Brotman, joined by Rose Kelly, open up an internal Forum3 leadership debate about whether their standing advice on enterprise AI tools is already out of date. The trigger is a new wave of personal-agent tools, Grokbot, Muse, and Instinct, that strip away chat histories, folders, and dashboards for one ongoing conversation with an AI teammate. The hosts trace their long-standing...

Andy Sack and Adam Brotman bring in Rose Kelly to help business leaders make sense of a term suddenly everywhere in the AI press: slowdown. The conversation starts with what triggered it: a widely discussed post from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei following the Hugging Face incident and a researcher departure that raised alarm about frontier model safety. Brotman clarifies that Amodei's proposal, echo...

 In this episode of AI First with Adam and Andy, Adam Brotman shares a client story: a finance executive responsible for a high-stakes, board-level cash-flow forecast could not keep pace with colleagues who had adopted frontier AI models, leaving him weeks behind on work others were turning around in hours. Andy Sack and Adam break down what actually separates effective AI use from noise: selectin...

Nirit Cohen spent three decades at Intel and the past fifteen years studying the future of work, publishing on the topic years before it became a boardroom priority. In this conversation with Adam Brotman and Andy Sack, she examines what happens to entry-level jobs and organizational structure as companies begin handing tasks to AI agents. Cohen challenges the idea that work can simply transition...

Andy Sack and Adam Brotman unpack Ghost GDP, a term from the Citrini report examined in their book, Agents Inc. The concept describes a scenario where AI agents perform work once done by people, letting companies keep producing goods and services, and even grow profits, without a matching rise in employment. They explain why this breaks the usual link between strong GDP and low unemployment: outpu...

Forum3 co-founders Andy Sack and Adam Brotman explain why restaurant chains have become central to their agentic AI strategy. Drawing on themes from their book, Agents Inc., they argue that the agentic era is changing the nature of competition, and that restaurants offer a rare combination of stability and opportunity: the core product will not be disrupted by AI, but nearly everything surrounding...

What happens when executives no longer need to navigate complex software interfaces, or rely on specialists to retrieve the information they need? Winslow co-founder Niel Robertson joins Adam Brotman and Andy Sack to explore how AI agents and conversational interfaces are reshaping HR technology, SaaS platforms, and systems of record. Robertson explains how agentic software can combine operational...

As AI moves from simple chatbots to autonomous digital teammates, business leaders face a new strategic question: how much risk are you willing to take for how much reward? In this episode of AI First with Adam and Andy, hosts Adam Brotman and Andy Sack introduce the agentic spectrum, a framework for understanding where an organization sits between assisted intelligence, agentic workflows, and ful...

Every leadership team weighing AI investment eventually runs into the same question: does automation mostly displace workers, or does it unlock new productivity and new roles. Adam Brotman and Andy Sack take on that debate directly, building on research from their book, Agents Inc. They walk through the reasoning behind their central estimate: most businesses today could run with at least 50 perce...

Adam Brotman and Andy Sack sit down to talk about the launch of their new book, Agents Inc: How to Rebuild Your Company in the Age of AI, and the living book concept built around it. Rather than a static text, the book is co-authored and now embodied by an AI agent named Vera Brown, who stays active after publication to answer reader questions and keep the content current. The conversation covers...

Adam Brotman and Andy Sack mark the launch of their new book, Agents Inc., in a mini episode facilitated by Forum3's Rose Kelly. The conversation picks up where last week's origin-story episode left off, moving from why the book exists to what it actually argues. At the center of the book is a framework: speed, order, aim, and the unlock. Brotman defines an agent against a chatbot, emphasizing per...

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....