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AI First with Adam and Andy: Inspiring Business Leaders to Make AI First Moves is a dynamic podcast focused on the unprecedented potential of AI and how business leaders can harness it to transform their companies. Each episode dives into real-world examples of AI deployments, the "holy shit" moments where AI changes everything, and the steps leaders need to take to stay ahead. It’s bold, actionable, and emphasizes the exponential acceleration of AI, inspiring CEOs to make AI-first moves before they fall behind.
Andy Sack (00:00)
This is AI First with Adam and Andy, the show about what happens when AI stops being a tool and starts becoming part of your workforce. I'm Andy Sack, and alongside my co-host Adam Brotman, each episode we talk with business on the front lines of the agentic era. What's working, what's failing, and how AI is changing the way companies operate. No hype, just real-world lessons and ideas you can put to work.
Adam recently
Showed a video that he built for a client. And what was striking was not the video itself, it was the way in which the video was made. We're going to share that story as well as talk about how the agentic era has totally transformed the way in which work is being done. With that, I want to hand it over to a colleague of ours at Forum3 Rose. Take it away.
Rose Kelly (00:48)
Hey guys, happy to be back again. so Adam, this episode is really inspired by a workflow that you had talked to us about that you did working on a video. And so I'd love for you to just tell us like how did that flow? And I have to admit, Andy said it was not really the video. The video itself was really impressive, but I think also the workflow is there's like a story behind that that I'd really love you to tell.
Adam Brotman (01:10)
You know what's interesting is that the moral of the story is that it almost wasn't a workflow, but it was, but it was the agent did all the work on the workflow, which is the moral of the story, which we'll come back to. So I was working on a video for a board meeting that I'm gonna be participating in, and I needed to present a kind of a complicated topic about a new initiative we were gonna launch. And it involved like
Strategy and economics and you know, history and a bunch of stuff. And I was like, okay, I could do a PowerPoint presentation, but I'd been seeing all these amazing videos that O Claude Opus 5.5 was able to just make, like on its own. Like it didn't even need any sort of other special plug-in or anything. And I was like, I wonder if I could do that. So I had tried it a couple days before the the big story that I'm talking to you about.
And I basically took a PowerPoint presentation that I had about the topic and I loaded it in and I said, Hey, my understanding is you're pretty good at making these videos. Like, and I made sure I was like on Opus 5.5
and I was on like max efforts. I was like, okay, I'm gonna like dial this all the way up on Opus 5.5. and I said, take this, attached video, and
show me what you got. And it was like a really simple prompt. I didn't tell it how to make the video, what the arc of the video would be. I did give it a PowerPoint presentation. Now it has memory, right? All of you that use ChatGPT or Claude, you know, it already had some context because it has memory and it has a sense of beyond just what I prompted it and what I loaded in the PowerPoint. And it made a video and I thought the video was like pretty good. I sent it to both of you and you both were like,
Wow, that was pretty freaking good. And I'm like, yeah, it was kind of I mean, definitely better than anything I've ever seen come out of AI in terms of like a one-shot video. But then I saw some other videos on Twitter that were like people showing examples, and they were like even better. and I was reading that people said, like, you know, they just lean in and just like like give examples to Claude. it'll even impress you more. So I said, okay, well, I took two of the best examples.
that I saw. I mean I'm talking about one that Elon Musk had retweeted, how cool it was. One was like some other one. And I was like, that was going viral. And I came back to Claude and I said, see these two videos. These are kind of like the the production quality I'm talking about. I want you to up your game. I told it. My prompt was literally like talking to it like this. I, you know, I want you to go back, find the video you made for me before. I'm not going to try and upload it here. Some big thick MP4 file. Like you find it.
And then go look at these reference videos and go make even a better video. And then it said, okay, I gotcha. I can handle this task. And it wrote me back and said, by the way, your connector to your Gmail and your calendar and your Google Drive and stuff is got disconnected for whatever reason. Can you reconnect that? And I'm like, sure. So I reconnect it. And then I watched as it went through and looked at all my emails.
like fish through hundreds of emails from the last couple weeks related to the topic that was in the prior video. It then found meeting transcripts of meetings I was in that were with people that we were talking about this topic. And then it just went and gathered all this information. It would have taken a human weeks to do. Okay. I'm talking like weeks to do, of like gathering all this information, fishing through it, analyzing it, and then it looked at the two reference videos.
And it worked for two hours and it produced this video. And I sent it to you guys and I like, this is I thought the other one was good, this was even better. And so I didn't tell it to go fish through those emails and go look at my transcripts and it was doing external research as well. So I didn't tell it to do any of that stuff. I I just was like, I
like the
Rose Kelly (04:39)
Can you actually,
I think what might be helpful for people is people who haven't created a video. If you were gonna do that same thing a year ago, how would you have had to instruct the AI? Like you chain of thought prompting and like attaching things and yeah.
Adam Brotman (04:47)
It would have been yeah, even
even with AI a year ago, I would have been, man, I gotta go get an account with like runway. And I gotta go get like one of these like text to video accounts. I gotta go get an account with Runway. I gotta go like go make I gotta go make
Andy Sack (05:02)
You'd have to scene by scene script.
Adam Brotman (05:05)
the video. Yeah, I gotta go sti Andy, you're right, scene by scene, I would have to go stitch this thing together.
Andy Sack (05:10)
I know it because I did it.
Adam Brotman (05:11)
Yeah, like it was like
Rose Kelly (05:13)
Yeah, like lots of meta prompting between fo three different tools to try to figure it out.
Adam Brotman (05:17)
And w yeah, w
exactly. to your point, Rose, what I probably would have done is I would have if I was being really good, even back a year ago, I would have had like ChatGPT or Claude actually give me like I would have fed it a bunch of like five, six different documents and PowerPoints and been like, hey, here's like all the information you need to know about this video I wanna make, but I'm gonna make the video in this other thing. I want you to give me my storyboard and some sort of a document, and then I would have had to like figure out how to like
copy and paste prompts from the one document and put it into the other program. And like, I don't have to do any of that stuff. and on top of that, like, I promise you, a year ago, if I had done all that, which would have taken me, that would have taken me a couple of weeks of time, because it would have been laborious, what it fitted in and in between stuff. Even if I had done that, I wouldn't have done as good a job as Opus 5.5 did at like doing the analysis and the legwork.
To go grab all this stuff, compile it, synthesize it, do the external research, pull it together. like it was way better at me at doing the prep work. And so the moral of the story, we said it in our book, Agents Inc., Andy and I did, we said autonomous agents, are going to take the work away from you to have to know how to even use the AI. that's the part that people are like, what are you talking about? I can just use AI, right?
How is it any different with an agent versus ChatGPT? And like, you still have to know how to use ChatGPT. You know who's better at using ChatGPT than you? ChatGPT. It's a weird thing to say. You know who's better at using a computer than you, ChatGPT. So, like, or a Claude. Like they're better at the actual workflow of using AI. So you can just not worry about that on some level and just worry about what am I trying to get done? What's the output I want? What's the video I want to give?
to the board, what's the emotional response, what's the takeaway I want them to have. I could literally say that to the agent. And it just, it worries about the how. I just have to worry about the what.
Rose Kelly (07:07)
Yeah, I love that. Like get out of the AI's way. Like don't be a blocker for the AI and let it let it do its magic. Andy, what was like your reaction? when Adam told us that story, you know, what did it make you think and what do you feel like is the shift that we think people really need to start understanding?
Andy Sack (07:22)
a couple things I'd highlight. One, Adam likes to talk that he's like, man, did you see that video I sent you? I one-shot that thing. So there's this language that Adam has originated, which he may not be the owner of. I'm sure it's being talked about elsewhere on Twitch, it's but it's elsewhere talked about. But this whole
Adam Brotman (07:36)
I did not come up with that. That's the c that's right. Right.
Andy Sack (07:40)
notion of I one-shotted it, which is like Adam.
we all I think use Whisper, which is the voice translation which allows you to just talk to your computer very seamlessly. And so Adam was, you know, voice explained as if he were talking to an employee or a videographer, a really, really talented, super smart analytical, video capable employee.
Of exactly what he wanted. And the part of that, I want you to create a video. Here's two examples. And you did it before for me. It wasn't good enough. And I want to make sure that you check your numbers because it's a board presentation. The numbers need to be accurate. And the fact that AI could take that one-shot verbal dump. and Adam's pretty good at giving verbal instructions in that way.
That he could take that one-shot verbal dump and it could go for two hours, sort through his inbox and do all that. That's amazing, right? And like comparing that to a year ago, like I said, I know because I was really excited about the video capabilities of AI, it was three tools, and you had to go scene by scene. And by the way, a year ago, that was friggin' amazing too. And it was amazing because
I didn't have the capability of creating a video in a weekend a year ago. And I was pretty happy to operate within three tools and just scene by scene do it. The fact that it's now down to two hours in one shot and the integration with the email research and the fact checking and being strategic, like, whoa, like that's a lot. Like the tactical with the strategic for a board presentation.
that Adam can do that verbally in one shot, like holy shit, that's a major tool. Like, we used to talk when we would do AI transformation about the mech suit and how the executives who know how to use this thing, it's gonna improve their capability, productivity, et cetera. Like, if you just digest where it is today, and this is the worst it's ever gonna be, like, holy cow.
Rose Kelly (09:39)
Yeah, there's something really interesting about like when you guys talk about in the book of like the unlock. This is such a huge unlock in that, you know, previously the way that Adam would have had to convey this was in a board deck. And not that board decks like board decks are getting better because of AI, but he's able to take it into a completely different medium that has so much more like
I think personality and emotion and, you know, visuals. So like people who learn different ways, people who absorb information in different ways, like it can be really, really effective. and so I think that is so interesting of like how it's creating these unlocks. But I think outside of video, let's just take it back to like maybe your day to day. Like what is that shift that people need to start making that like, you know, less on the micromanaging how and more towards the, you know, what?
How
what does that look like, Adam, in like a day-to-day interaction with your, agentic AI platform?
Adam Brotman (10:31)
Well, I'll tell you, and I know Andy's in the same boat. I'm a little bit agent pilled right now. So the truth is ChatGPT and Claude are fully agents now. Like when you use them, I would have called them like really powerful chat.
Andy Sack (10:43)
You're more than
agent you're also opus pilled right now.
Adam Brotman (10:46)
That's true. I am opus pilled, but you know, I was Astra pilled a week before, so you know and then
Andy Sack (10:50)
I know, I know.
Adam Brotman (10:51)
and I saw today.
Rose Kelly (10:52)
And grok pilled.
Adam Brotman (10:53)
Yeah. so independent of whether it's, you know, Claude or ChatGPT or Grokbot, the thing that's interesting, the more agentic the system is, meaning the more it has a concept of persistence, meaning it has memory.
It can proactively do things. It's already connected to all the right data sets that it probably needs to do most of what you would want it to do even before you ask it to do it. Like think about that concept of, you know, it's in business and in life, we've always talked about that, like, you know, the best employee, or the best assistant or even the best server at a restaurant. they're bringing you something like they read your mind, like they knew what you wanted even before you asked for it. Well.
How is that possible? Well, the reason how they know that, a great server, a great teammate, a great whatever, great friend, is that they they know you, right? They know what you care about, they know what objectives you have, they know you. And so the more an agent system gets to know you, and by the way, the best way it gets to know you is you tell it what you care about. Like in general,
These are my goals and objectives. These are the things I care about. if you tell an agent that's got persistence, memory, borderline super intelligent capabilities, it's going to do these things in a way that's it's surprising and very helpful. So let's go back to something Andy said. Because I like it. Andy's right when I talk about the one-shot, right? So the one-shot thing.
I do say it because I'm saying, like, I didn't have to like revise this. When I when I say one shot, what I mean by that, and Andy, you conveyed it well, it's like what's impressive is like this wasn't like six tries. It used to be you needed to do six tries and iterate on it and correct mistakes, and now it's like it does it itself because it's agentic, it plans and goes through stuff and then checks its own work a lot of the times and whatever. So it's like that's why I'm like one shot. But the funny thing about the one shot is that.
I was telling Andy, like it makes me laugh. The agent, if it could talk to me so to speak, it would it would be like, What do you mean, one shot? Might have been one shot for you. Like I did, I went to 40 different websites. I revised that thing 16 different times. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like it wasn't the
Rose Kelly (12:55)
You can see it QAing and like redoing it again and changing the colors.
Adam Brotman (12:59)
it's a one-shot you, the human, but like to the to your agent, your agent's like, no, the reason it was a one-shot for you is because it was a many step
verified complex process that I went through on your behalf. and I actually I don't mean to anthropomorphize it too much, but my point is that's what's going on with an agent and it's doing all that stuff so that you don't have to like go back to it over and over. You still have to check the work, right? You still have to validate it. We said that in our book. It's about steer it and validate it. Be an output manager. And like these are examples that we're talking about.
Rose Kelly (13:31)
it's a big shift but like less thinking about it like working with software more like managing and as the user you're not supposed to be focused on the how they should get it done you're focused on what you want and then deciding if the result is you know good enough your own taste and judgment so I love that Andy any last words and then if not you want to wrap us up
Andy Sack (13:49)
No, I just I mean I love the story. I love when my business partner gets excited about one-shotting prompts. we're definitely in the agentic era. It started at the beginning of this year. It's just amazing the pace we're on. So with that,
Hope you share the enthusiasm for the agentic era that we all do. I want to thank you all for listening to AI First with Adam and Andy. For more on how to build and run a company in the Agentic Era, you can go to Forum3.com. You'll find practical resources for leading with AI. Sign up for our free weekly workshops and find links to our book, Agents Inc., How to Rebuild Your Company in the Age of AI. We truly believe you can't overinvest in your AI learning. Onward.