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Andy Sack — co-founder of Forum3 and co-author of “AI First” — joins Nick to share the “holy shit moment” behind the book: Sam Altman telling him that 95% of marketing will be done by AGI within three to five years. That sentence, delivered at OpenAI’s San Francisco offices in 2023, reframed their entire project.
Sack argues the shift is bigger than the internet and backs it up: a CEO who built an AI churn-detection tool from Zoom transcripts over Christmas break, and the looming extinction of routine radiology reads. He draws a sobering parallel between the 20 million service jobs lost during COVID and the white-collar displacement AI is now engineering.
The conversation ends on an optimistic note. Sack sees a coming entrepreneurship boom as AI collapses startup costs, and he leaves leaders with one starting point: become AI-first yourself before you ask your organization to follow.
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Today's guest has built companies across four tech eras, internet, mobile, social cloud, and now AI. He's been an entrepreneur, a VC, and spent years inside Big Tech and the digital transformation. Andy co-founded Forum 3, where he advises leaders on AI strategy and co-authored AI First with Adam Brotman, the mine behind the Starbucks loyalty app. We were fortunate enough to interview Sam Altman at the Open AI offices in San Francisco, and about two thirds of the way through the conversation, Sam says 95% of marketing as we know it today will be done by AGI within three to five years. Adam's like, did you hear what he said?
We were like, holy shit, it blew our mind. That was their holy shit moment, and it set the tone for what you're about to hear. How fast this is moving and how leaders can adapt. AI on personal assessment is having seen this before is that it's bigger than the internet. It's bigger than any other human invention. In one of our interviews, the chief AI officer at Moderna, it's as big as electricity, if not bigger. We talk about education from AI only schools to what colleges need to face. You're seeing already AI schools, AI only like no humans involved, teaching elementary school, teaching high school, the ability of AI to personalize to the students learning style is really the power.
I don't think that the human in the loop is requiring. Do I think that it can be beneficial? Yes, I do. This conversation is part wake up call, part playbook. If you've been wondering how to lead, not just react in the age of AI, you're in the right place. The first lesson is that AI first companies start with AI first leaders and start to use AI in their own personal life and go, oh, if they can help me do this, what if I started to use AI and got this at scale in my organization? Let's dive in with Andy Sack. Andy, welcome to the show. I was really struck by the opening in your book where you and your co-author Adam Brotman.
You said you had a holy shit moment with no one other than Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI who created Chad GPT. Can you tell me about that moment? Yeah, we were fortunate enough to interview Sam Altman at the OpenAI offices in San Francisco in November of 23. And Adam and I flew down there. We go to this nondescript industrial area of San Francisco. Notably, there was no security there. We walk into the offices. We meet Sam and we sit down and proceed to have an hour-long conversation with Sam. And about two-thirds of the way through the conversation, which was informal and friendly and informative and educational, Sam says we were specifically asking about marketing and design.
And Sam says, I don't know anything. I don't know very much about marketing design, but 95% of marketing as we know it today will be done by AGI within three to five years. And that's right. So we continued. The interview ended. Adam and I leave the office and we go outside and there was a park next door and we're debriefing on the interview. And Adam was like, did you hear what he said? And was referring to that quote. And we were like, holy shit, it blew our minds that that timeline and his description, what does it mean for 95% of marketing as we know it to be done by AGI? That was two years ago.
A lot has happened in the domain of AI since that interview. And the definition of AGI is varied amongst professionals, but so the technology is moving so fast that we kind of think he's more right than wrong and the level of automation that's happening. And so that was our holy shit moment. And we wanted to call the book the holy shit moment and we discussed that with Harvard Business Press and they really wanted to go with AI first. They thought it was a more Harvard press oriented title. And so we got the compromise was to title the first chapter of that. Nice, nice. I can imagine that was an interesting conversation with them when you said you wanted to title it.
It wasn't interesting. It was more than one conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Well, for whatever it's worth when when I read the book, I loved the title of that first chapter, grab my attention. And I thought it really got to the core of the shock that many of us are feeling or the moment that many of us are having when we realize how big this change is going to be. And it happens a different times for different people. But I thought you guys captured that with that chapter because I mean, I'll just moment. You've had you've had it. I mean, I'd say that I've continued to have it. And I think people people have it regularly when interfacing at different times with AI.
Now, before we jump into all the implications and what people can do to deal with this transition in a positive way and a helpful way for their lives, let's jump into your background a little bit. The company you and Adam started form three and let's just get a sense of of who you are and where you're coming from. And then and then we can jump into the future. Sure. When I introduced myself first, I'm a career technologist. I happened to stop my first internet company in 1995. So I've been through the internet era, the mobile era, the social, the social cloud era and now the AI era. And my career was during the 90s.
I was an entrepreneur starting a few internet companies that I was fortunate enough to exit. And then I became a venture capitalist in Seattle. In 2015, I worked for Sachin Nadella from 2015 to 2021. Just as he became CEO and I worked directly for him and out of the office, the CEO doing digital transformation. And just a clarify he's CEO of Microsoft, right? Yeah, yes. I think that is that everybody knows that. But yes, yeah, Sachin Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft. I want to say in 2016, 2015, some like read it right at the beginning of and I worked with him like eight months before that and then continued to work for him.
Okay. And then you're your co-author. Just a few notes on. My co-author and co-founder and dear friend Adam Brotman was the chief digital officer of Starbucks for 11 years. Up there was president of J. Crew, left there and had a brief stint at Bright Loom prior to his start at Form 3 with me. And he created the Stottobux loyalty program. We're not sponsored by Starbucks today, but I did use the loyalty program app that he helped to create or not spearheaded. He conceived of, designed, built and grew that loyalty app from nothing to now, which I want to say it does 60% of Starbucks US business goes through that loyalty app.
And it's widely recognized as one of the top loyalty apps in the world. Absolutely. And then you two came together to create Form 3. What does that firm do? And so Form 3 is a AI transformation company where we do apply to AI consulting. We do digital transformation for companies that want to become AI first. Now, let's start with you decide to write a book. And the book is AI first, the playbook for future proof business and brand. But it was not originally, that was not originally what the book was going to be about. So let's dive into that story. Yeah. So Harvard Business Press approached us and actually wanted to do a book on digital loyalty given Adam's background.
And it was right at the time that chat GBT 3.5 had come out, which was November of 21. And we pitched the idea of doing the book on generative AI, recognizing that we, you know, in January of 22 that AI was going to be, was the most significant technology out there. And Harvard Business Press said, OK, it's a chore. And so we titled the working title at that time was RAI Journey. And the idea behind the book was that it was going to be the first ever serial book by Harvard Business Press, which means we would release a chapter and engage a company. And we would meet with the community of readers and audience along the way.
And then the idea there was that if we wrote a book and published it, it would be out of date unless we released it along the way, given it was on AI. And we would meet with really the leaders in the field, the Sam Altman's, the Reed Hoffman's, the Bill Gates. And we would meet with them and talk to them about their perspective on AI and the AI era. And it would be our learning journey as we went along. Now, I mean, that's an interesting way to write a book, but probably the only way you could do it with a technology that is shifting so rapidly. Yes, I mean, it's a typical way. Like most books people go, I have an idea for a book and they write an outline.
And they proceed to write each chapter. For us, it was much more of a journey. We had gone, like I said before, we're both career technologists. And so we had gone through these periods before and AI was relatively new to both of us. And so it was our own way of engaging with and learning about and trying to understand what AI meant for businesses and brands. And so we started with the field of the people building the LLMs. And then we about midway through with feedback from the audience, we did a second, the second part of the book is all about case studies and how this applies to business leaders and executives and brands.
And we really tried to go and illustrate through case studies how different leaders were tackling the digital transformation required with AI. Well let's dive into that. How big is this transformation going to be? I mean, nobody knows. Let's start there. But I mean, my own personal assessment is having seen this before is that it's bigger than the internet. It's bigger than any other human invention. In one of our interviews, we met with the chief AI officer at Moderna. And I liked how he put it. It's as big as electricity if not bigger. Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's like literally like we went from dark to light.
Right. And it's difficult for any of us, I guess all of us who grew up with electricity to even imagine what life was like before that. And I have a feeling it's going to be really difficult for kids that are being born today in 20 years for them to imagine what it was like for life before the AI transformation or the age of AI. I completely agree. And I think like we're really it's the pace of the technology that sets it apart, the pace of the invention. Yeah, they're the I'm blanking on the gentleman's name, but he has deep mind for Google and he's brilliant. And I will put it in the show notes when I look it up.
But he said the it will be 10 times the amount of change as the Industrial Revolution. And it's going to happen 10 times as fast, which means we're talking about a hundred acts difference in what the Industrial Revolution did for society. Yes. Stop. Okay. So we've got incredible change. It's massive. It's massive. It's massive in huge. Yeah. So you're what's your assessment in at this moment for for businesses for brands? How do we get started to deal with this transformation? Well, you can buy the book. I mean, the book is the book is meant to be a playbook for for leaders to answer just that quote specific question.
I think that what what we've seen it form three is, you know, we've talked with hundreds of business leaders, CEOs and executive teams and boards. And there's no question that the pace of the understanding of the technology as well as the implementation of it and its application lags behind the pace of the technology, which is very similar to what you just described. I don't think people really understand. I mean, AI is is in the media all the time. People know it's a big deal, but the actual, you know, the actual application is is and human chain like we're just slower at at that change. Right.
Right. Well, let's let's talk about some of those case studies there in ways that you've seen companies and brands begin to implement this and how it's changing their processes within those companies and changes that are happening. Yeah. So, I mean, there we highlight a couple in the book. We interviewed Matt Britton from Susie, which is a consumer research company that does like research for Pepsi and other consumer big consumer brands. And he is a non-technical CEO, yet a venture backed eight figure business. And he read about started a play with AI and he tried to get his organization to adopt it.
And his first approach to getting to, you know, to use AI in their business, his first approach was to try to go to his customers at these consumer packaged good brands and sell it to them. And they were, it was too, he was too far ahead of the market at the time and he was frustrated. It was the sales, his sales department was slow at adopting it. And then he tried to get his product team to adopt it and they were slow at adopting it the engineering for whatever reason. And so it was Christmas time and he just decided, you know, I can do this. And so what he did was he took all of the sales calls that had been recorded effectively by his, what he used as zoom and he took all those transcripts and he built an app, a custom GPT himself, that analyzed those sales calls and basically made an early warning churn system for his sales team.
And so he did that over Christmas break, like a week long project. And he like, it immediately started to work and really he then proceeded to do other applications himself and really led his organization to go, this is what's possible. And now he's transformed his company, sales are up materially. He's not had to hire as many people as a result. And that's a great example of the kind of transformation and productivity lift that can come from AI. And so the model learned from those past conversations. Correct. And what some of the warning signals were if they were going to lose a customer or not on boards, a new client and then could alert the team that some attention was needed there.
Is that right? That's right. I mean, the first one that he did was a churn analysis. And he took he took the sales data plus the like what happened with customers and then train, you basically use that data to have the AI analyze current customer calls and go, Oh, that call you just had with that customer that there were some yellow flags on that and it would alert the sales person and they would engage in a different way. Early warning, early warning churn. Hey, because it can pick up on patterns and signals that most humans are not going to because of the granularity with which it can analyze things.
I guess it's similar to how they're seeing with radiology, AI can pick up things in a scan earlier than 90% of radiologists. It might even be higher. I mean, radiology is what I think I think radiology as a profession may for most x-ray is certainly these hips and shoulders, I think will will become extinct because it's better than it's less error prone than standard and then standard radiologists. Right. Well, and that does get to the heart of a concern for a lot of people, which is that if you are a radiologist, where you are a digital marketer and 95% of those jobs are going to go away, if not a higher number than that.
And what does the future look like for those people? I mean, is it should they start on that retraining now? Is it a matter of getting familiar with the AI tools so that they can gift what they're doing? Do we have any positive news for those folks? I mean, do we have any positive news for those folks? I mean, let me make a couple of broad comments to sort of put your question into context and then I'll try and answer your specific questions with specific advice. The broad, I've gotten really interested in the economic implications of AI and there's no, I think we in the book, we interview Bill Gates, who I think is a fantastic person with even more perspective and in the sort of computer age and the transformation that's gone with the PC, let alone the internet error.
And Bill said to us, and we document this in the book, that his, when he saw a chat GBT 4.0 past the AP biology exam, that it was as significant, if not more significant, than when he saw the graphical user interface in Palo Alto and in the 70s. And so, you know, that perspective is really, I think, powerful. He also then in a subsequent follow-up conversation, he said to us that he's never seen a technology that has the economic tailwinds that AI has. And the economic tailwinds are dead at the heart of what you're talking about, which is the labor displacement. I mean, we just were talking about radiology.
So how, you know, how many jobs, like just to put it into context, during COVID, you know, COVID, we went into a total shutdown mode. You know, the world stopped. And all the jobs that, all the service jobs at hotels and restaurants, like all those, you know, fitness clubs, all those people went up, were either furloughed or, or were laid off. And there were 20 million jobs that, during that period of time. And basically, the same number of jobs, but now all white-collar workers are at risk with AI, just to put it into sort of context of the size of the job displacement. And it's really the nature of the job that's different.
For some reason, the world was less concerned with waiters and waitresses than they were with radiologists. You know, for someone who's gone through medical school, I mean, let's stick with the radiology metaphor. Like it's, you know, I don't know what to say. It's like you grow up thinking that you're, you're, and you go to medical school for 10 years and internship and residency. And then you get displaced by technology. Yeah, you should be, I mean, I don't know, my career advice would be, yes, you should start retraining and retraining should start yesterday. I don't have good advice for the radiologist.
I did get a call from, I did get a call from a law, someone who had just graduated law school. And they were asking, and for them, I think like for the, you know, the new grads, I think increasing your AI proficiency is absolutely the most tantamount thing that you can do. And becoming AI proficient is the number one thing that you can do for yourself, both within law and more broadly, there will be new job creation. I'm pretty confident of that. What exactly that looks like? It's hard to say, but proficiency in AI is sort of the, you know, the starting gate. Yeah, I thought it was interesting.
I just saw this, the enrollment in trade schools was up in 2025 for the first time in several decades with young high school graduates and their number one sided concern or reason for jumping into a trade. I mean, we're talking electricians, plumbers is job security because they're so fearful of what the white collar job market will look like in five to 10 years. Any thoughts on that shift? I mean, two comments. One is, I think that that's a great strategy. So like, I guess if you're a radiologist, you could start studying to become a electrician or a plumber. I know that HVAC is a big growth area.
So I think trade schools is an interesting one. I mean, just I have a son who just graduated from university. I gave him the same advice. I said, you know, you should go study to be a plumber for a year. Like you'll, you know, you won't regret it. He's going to cooking school a period of time, which is a form of trade. I think we're going to see in the next few years a huge as people are confronted with the reality, the economic realities of careers changing. I think you're going to see a huge birth in entrepreneurship and what that looks like. I don't exactly know, but I think you're going to see AI enables a whole new kind of opportunity for business creation, which is an alternative path.
And I think you're going to see a lot of that as well. Well, and as an entrepreneur, I find that really exciting. I think it's a rewarding. Have to take in life. And it is an exciting time on the on the upside of all this change to think that it. AI will probably make it easier than ever to create a new business because there won't be the same capital requirements that there have traditionally been in the past because AI could handle a lot of the low level work that you would need to hire out. I mean, that's in the immediate term. Certainly that will grow into higher level work over time. People are probably familiar with the term unicorn, which are these companies that reach a billion.
Is it a billion dollar valuation without going public? But I heard the new term is donkey corn, which is to create a billion dollar company with no employees. And that's a wild concept and an exciting one if you look at it in terms of opportunity. Yeah, I don't know. I think donkey corn may be wrong, but I think donkey corn is meant to be these sort of smaller opportunities that are not venture funded that are small team. They make 10 million, but they have a very high revenue or profit per employee. I think unicorn is still meant for the regardless of how many employees it is still meant for the billion dollar non-public company.
Now, if you were advising young entrepreneurs, young people today who are interested in that, what sort of ideas would you encourage them to explore using these new tools that exist? Well, I have a couple of comments about that. One is that you mentioned that entrepreneur is that for sure you're going to need less capital. The other really interesting thing about starting a company today is that you're the skillset you need. You don't need a whole team of developers. You don't need a whole team of designers. Your business involves video. Suddenly, the palette of skill sets, the AI really works for you, with you, to augment your skills.
And so you can really do a lot with a small team to build a business. I actually think it's what's amazing about entrepreneurship today is really the speed of iteration. And it's like you have an idea, you try it and move it along and learn. And if that doesn't work, then you pivot and you try something else. So I think it's really about iteration and speed of iteration. So if we impact the actual specific idea matters less. So interesting. So just getting involved in trying something and finding what works and then pivoting to really focus on whatever is starting to work a little bit. That's right.
That's right. That's right. And would you lean more towards ideas that are more human-centered and involve human-human interaction and empathy or hands-on work? Is that kind of case to the end? Sure. I guess what I would say is I would use the AI and the large language models to help you IDA, help you narrow down which ideas to go pursue. For sure, being strategic about where the LOMs are going to continue to get smarter and their footprint is going to continue to grow. So differentiating, being a pure digital company, being purely online is challenging, but it provides for speed and scale. If you point out, there's no question that this intersection of human plus AI and having a real real world footprint actually becomes a defensible mode now.
As opposed to before, it's just like it slowed you down. Right. defensible mode. So we need to get specific about specific ideas to get more granular. Well, let's dig into a specific idea then. I know you spent some time with Saul and Khan Academy. And I have thought a lot about something like teaching where, especially if it's one-on-one teaching with an individual. I mean, our firm that helps sponsor this show, Tess Prep-Gurus does SAT preparation. There's one-on-one college consulting. It's really, it's very high touch and involved with a person. But if, as I learn more and more about AI and I'm projecting out into the future, it does not seem impossible at all to be able to teach an AI to codify how you teach someone effectively to do well on an exam or those choices to make in the future.
And yet at the same time, there's something that is different about having, and if it's a large language model, it's not quite the same at that authority relationship. Whereas if you are my teacher and you say, Nick, you didn't do any of the work we agreed you were going to do in between our sessions, if the AI is telling me that, I just go like, yeah, I didn't. I'll do it next week. But if you, Andy Sack, tell me that. There's, I feel like there's a human response to that where I go, you know what, you're right, I didn't do it. I need to double down this next week and make this stuff happen. What do you hear, what's your inclination on that?
Is that human element necessary in something as specific as teaching another human? Is the human element necessary? No, it's not it's not necessary. I mean, you're seeing already, there's news, recent news, last few months of AI schools, AI only, like no humans involved, teaching elementary school, teaching high school. I know that Khan Academy, which is funded by the Gates Foundation, did a test in, I want to say New Jersey high schools. And what's really powerful about having talked to Sal Khan and is that the personal, the ability of AI to personalize to the students learning style is really the power.
Because you learn differently than me and I learn differently than you and, and AI is able to adapt, particularly if we're trying to learn a new skill, let's say like math. So I don't know, I don't believe, I actually think that AI in education, AI is going to massively change. It should change. And I don't think that the, the human in the loop is required. Do I think that it can be beneficial? Yes, I do. So there is a role for human teachers still. It's just the taking advantage of the AI's ability to adapt and personalize to one's learning skill. And you know, I think you're already seeing like the gamification elements of art can be, can be implemented as well.
So, you know, I think it's an intersection of the, those of learning. Right, changing the nature of the work and focusing on, really on the elements that none of the repeatable parts of the process would be, would be done by humans. And, and for a teacher, that might be exciting. And it might help them to, to scale a really good teacher to be able to work with more students and really uplift all of education to a higher level of education to more students on a scale we've never seen before. Yeah, I think the real area that probably where humans need to is just the, you know, the social community.
I mean, the human in a human to human interaction, which, you know, previously was all done by the peer group of the class and the teacher. And the teacher acted as a, you know, an alternate parent figure. You know, how that interplay is with a in these AI schools. What is the role of community and peer group? What is the role of authority figures into, in terms of the social developmental process of students, I think is really, we're innovation and, and we're in new territory. This episode is brought to you by Manta Sleep. As you have a stuely observed, I've got one of their sleep masks on my face right now.
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Follow the steps in the connect tab. And if you're an admin on a chat GPT enterprise account, you can enable MCP across your entire workspace. So if you're ready to stop wasting time on busy work, join the AI revolution, and make a little automation magic of your own. Try the Zapier chat GPT integration using the link below. Yeah. Now you mentioned your son just graduated from college. How do you see higher education, college and graduate school specifically needing to change to help better prepare students for world of the world is headed? I mean, let's start by saying it's broken. Yeah. So it's cooked.
It's clearly broken. And it's broken in the same way that, you know, like the world is changing and the university system has really not kept pace with the level of change. There's a I think teachers both in high school and in college have an impossible challenge right now because you know, chat GPT and other LLMs are being used for every assignment by the and my son graduated. He's the last sort of graduating class that like where chat GPT wasn't, they're not coming in as a chat GPT college student, right? You know, sort of a hybrid. And there's this, you know, there's a real concern about like, you know, what happens to the skill of writing?
If chat GPT is doing all of the writing of your essays, you know, do you need to learn to write to be to be able to edit? I think you do, but there's that question mark of skill degradation. Yeah, so I really have a lot of empathy for teachers today, mostly because the industry is lacking in the pace of innovation and adaptation to the world. I don't know, like, you know, I don't know what happens to college 10 years from now. It's hard to know. And for that matter, it's not just college, it's all of these. You know, there's colleges, there's radiology, there's plumbing. And in each case, there's a different level of impact of AI.
So yeah, I mean, I, if we were talking about kind of a traditional liberal arts education, I think it speaks to that the system isn't keeping up if using these tools amounts to cheating. That strikes me as a sign because I hear a lot of professors and teachers saying that, I go, well, yeah, but everyone I know in their professional workplace is using it at some level, whether it's helping with a small thing, like helping with a, you know, proofread a document or put together a pitch deck. And then some people are really taking off with it and doing the the vibe coding and creating new businesses with it.
And it clearly is the future. So labeling it as a tool for cheating and demonizing it, that doesn't seem the right approach at all. I agree. On the flip side though, I do think learning how to write is a critical component of developing your critical thinking skills. I mean, I'm sure it helped you and Adam, when you wrote AI first, just to clarify your thinking and be able to think and speak more clearly on the topic. And that is a, that is a hard thing to reconcile because it's, we probably do need some part of the education to be oriented on making sure people learn, still learn how to write the young people learn how to write.
If for no other reason, then to develop those critical thinking skills. No, yeah, no question. And it used to be like, okay, deliver me this five page essay, I think teachers are resorting to, okay, we're going to use this class and like everyone compute, put your computers down, get an old school, get out a pen and paper. I want you to write an essay on, you know, what, you know, what you've learned this year, you know, like just using the hour to actually force people to write, I think teachers are resorting to that kind of skill development. Yes. Well, it seems like a yes and type of situation.
I mean, I used, still use Excel and spreadsheets. And obviously that makes me much mathematically stronger. And I can figure things out in a form looking at something that's finance related that I could not without that tool. And yet I think back to graduate school, I did an MBA, and I did have a finance professor who said we're you are not allowed to use any sort of spreadsheet in this class. We're gonna you're gonna have to actually figure out how to solve these things with old school math. And we could only use a very basic calculator for basic calculation. And a lot of people really frustrated with that, the way that he set that class up.
Man, there was a point a couple months into it, it was really difficult to not rely on those tools. But you could I know it with myself and with other classmates, we learned the some of the underlying principles in that math that we would not, it would just would have been so easy to skip over them, because the Excel could do it for you had that teacher not forced us to do it the hard way. And so maybe it's a matter of both. I mean, we have some classes that that forced us to learn to be able to write. And then other ones where we're trying to produce our best work with any tools available to us, including AI.
And totally agree. Well, let's let's come back to AI first and the brands and businesses. So we're going to start experimenting with the tools. We're going to buy the book AI first and we're going to read it and learn from those case studies. Others thoughts for people that are have a current business and maybe and it's not something like radiology where it's like, man, this whole thing is going to be taken over. We're in that in between space. What are the next steps for those people who are listening right now and going like, Andy, I want I want to I want you to help me figure this out on the things I can do as a leader to help lead my organization in the right direction so that it isn't completely obsolete in a couple of years.
Yeah. So the book is aimed at CEOs and executive teams, predominantly of consumer businesses, not necessarily the like mom and pop one store, toy store, or bookstore. It's meant for businesses of with with more employees and more revenue. And so the first thing is, is like, we really encourage that we really our first lesson is that AI first companies start with AI first leaders. And then we start to talk about what does it mean to be an AI first leader. And Salkan was an example of an AI first leader. Matt Britton, who I mentioned earlier from Susie was another example. And it's these CEOs who have their holy ship moment or their AI aha moment and start to use AI in their own personal life and go, Oh, if I, you know, if this can help me do this, you know, what if I started to use AI and got this at scale in my organization.
And so that's the first the first lesson. After that, if we encourage people to not focus on the people want to jump to the app layer, the application layer, like a big implementation. And what we really try to do is get a broad swell of employees using the using AI to capture the the productivity gains in AI. And we call that really like the iron man suit or the mech suit where it's humans plus AI are doing their daily jobs more faster and with greater productivity. And there's it's been proven that there can be a 30%, 20 to 40% lift in productivity just from micro use cases before even getting to full automation and applications.
We encourage people to form an AI council and have an AI policy. And that's sort of the start of the playbook. And then if you can afford it and have a company that can handle it adding an AI officer, I believe was correct. So someone that's diving into this all the time and just looking at every aspect of the business, how can we make these small gains or huge gains using these tools? Yeah, in the in the last chapter of the book, we interviewed Ethan Moloch, who's a war professor and one of the leading influencers and thought leaders around AI. And he really challenged us. He said, your playbook's great for chat TPT four.
But it, you know, it's it doesn't really like, you know, you're not pushing business leaders enough on really how much they how fast and how much they they need to reinvent their businesses. And, you know, at first, Adam, I were a little taken aback by that. But, you know, we did an epilogue to the book and and given the year, the epilogue was basically we think, you know, Ethan Moloch was right that that really the business is going to need to reinvent itself and automate itself in ways that it hasn't before. And so you really having somebody focused on that that's knowledgeable about what the tools are capable of and what they're not capable of is really critical to making that happen at your at your business.
When I read that part of the book, I was reminded of Madman, the TV show from, I don't know, a decade ago or maybe more now. And how at the beginning, they're they're just TV. Color TV is just coming into it existence. And there's one guy in the big marketing firm who says, well, why don't we have a TV department? This looks like this could be another line of marketing. And then it's fast forward a couple seasons later. And he's a partner in the company and it's this huge department. And they were leading the way on that because they had one person who was who was a one man TV department initially.
And then it became the the focal point of the entire marketing firm at some point in the future. And I'm sure that's where we're all headed with this AI technology. And you guys are right on the the foot foot when putting this book out there. AI first. Highly recommend it to anyone who has a existing business and you're looking at those next steps and how to lead your company. If you're a young entrepreneur and you want some ideas on on maybe how to execute your vision. And yeah, fantastic work from you guys. And I really appreciate your time, Andy. Nick, thank you. I appreciate yours. Oh, and if anyone wants to find you online, find form three online where where should they go?
Our website is forum three.com. I can be reached via LinkedIn or Andy at forum three.com. Okay, fantastic. And we'll put that in the show notes as well. Andy, thank you so much for coming on. And I hope to talk again sometime soon in the future. Nick, thanks for having me. Okay, everybody. Until next time, ask questions. Don't accept the status quo and be curious.