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.
AI FIRST WITH ADAM AND ANDY EP 1
Andy Sack: Elon Musk's power play against Sam Altman and OpenAI is going to be successful in 2025. It's going to have tremendous implications to the AI large language model landscape. And I actually think X AI is going to become. Is going to rise to the top of that. That's a further prediction. Microsoft is going to be affected, Google will be affected, and obviously OpenAI. This is AI first with Adam and Andy, the show that takes you to the front lines of AI innovation in business. I'm Andy Sack alongside my co host Adam Brotman. Each episode we bring you candid conversations with business leaders transforming their businesses with AI. No fluff, straight talk, real use cases and insights for you. Happy New Year, everybody. Adam, great to see you. We're recording this before the New Year. This is our first episode of AI first with Adam and Andy. I'm so excited for the new year for Forum three and for this pod.
Adam Brotman: Happy New Year. From the past.
Andy Sack: Back to the future. Back to the future. So I think what we had talked about doing this episode is, I mean, I think we should probably introduce the pod and give people a little context of where the idea came from and our positioning, uh, as a pod, like why, why the world needs yet another AI pod show. And then we will get to predictions for the year. I think that's where we want to start, which is a little, uh, anomalous, I think, for what you'd expect. We don't have a guest today, but Adam, why don't you start with like, what was the inspiration for the pod or, or for the positioning. Give a little pe, Give people a little insight about what's to come.
Adam Brotman: Yeah.
Andy Sack: What to expect from us.
Adam Brotman: So I hope everybody gets something out of this that they're not getting out of. Other, uh, there's a lot of other great podcasts around AI in general and just technology as well. So there's podcasts that give you sort of news of the day and of the week and keep you up to speed and do a really good job of helping you to sort of understand what's happening in AI at a big picture level and a trend level. There's other podcasts that talk about the business, you know, of AI, uh, at a macro level, like, you know, thinking about, like, trends and the big players and all that. And then there's of course a thousand of these, like YouTube shows that tell you how to get rich from AI, how to prompt AI or whatever. We're coming at it from a totally different perspective. We wrote a book called AI first, that is about to come out, uh, in hardcover form from Harvard Business Review. We've actually already relieved it digitally to a community of our readers that we put together when we publish the book serially. And the book. And now our business is coming from a unique perspective of if you're a brand builder and a business leader, an organization leader, and you want to really understand, like, what do you do as CEO or leader to understand, to get your hands around this Gen AI thing, Like, what is it? Like, what do you do? What's the process? What are some good use cases? How do you build around this? We're coming at it from that very practical perspective, sitting, uh, being two people that have sat in the seat of CEOs and CMOs and CDOs and whatnot. And so we're going to take the approach on this podcast, just like we did in our book, which is unique to Adam and Andy and our worldview and our experience set. And it's meant to be kind of by business leaders and operators, for business leaders and operators. And that's why it's gonna be full of case studies and examples and not fluff. And just. We're just gonna talk to our readers and our listeners like we would to our clients, which is like we would to our colleagues. Like, we're like, we've been in the trenches, we've sat on the boards, we've sat in the C suites, and we're just gonna approach it from that perspective and just be honest and transparent and. And hopefully helpful in that regard.
Andy Sack: Yeah, I think that, uh, I think you hit the salient points of who it's for and what we hope to bring. Um, I think, Adam, why don't you, like, let's give people just. We won't do this each week, but why don't you give a brief introduction of yourself. I'll do the same. And. And then if there's anything else we want to say about the pod, about what's coming, I have something to add afterwards. Um, so why don't you go first with your background?
Adam Brotman: So I'm, you know, lifelong Seattle guy, lifelong digital entrepreneur and operator. Uh, I was. I founded a digital company called Play Network.
Andy Sack: Right.
Adam Brotman: Uh, after being a lawyer, uh, at the beginning of my career. And I've never done anything but digital innovation, digital transformation, and, uh, digital engagement since then. So that. That first company was called Play Network. It was a digital music company. I went on to go work for Bill Gates, actually, through a company, not Microsoft, but a company
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Adam Brotman: called Corbus that Did digital IM imagery, uh, and digital image licensing. Went on to be the chief digital officer at Starbucks for the bulk of my career. Uh after that was at this president and co CEO at J. Crew and have come back now to the west coast and done a number of entrepreneurial endeavors, most notably partnering with my buddy Andy uh, as co founder and co CEO at Forum3. So that's you know and I sit on a number of boards as du. Uh and we, so we like at this stage of our career we like being kind of part operator, part mentor, part consultant and, and that's, that's who we are. That's who I am.
Andy Sack: Yeah. So I'm Andy Sack and career entrepreneur and technologist. So I started my first Internet company in 1995, the uh 90s. I was an operator of four startups, sold three of them successfully. I became a venture capitalist in Seattle, a seed stage venture capitalist, a founders co op, worked with techstars but most notably I spent seven years working directly for Satya Nadella just as he became CEO. And so I worked doing digital transformation at Microsoft which prepared me really for the work that I'm doing now with you adam@forum3. And I've been fortunate enough. We uh, started this company a couple years ago. It wasn't necessarily intended, it was almost by accident that we started this company together. But we've been friends for a long time and it's been, it's been awesome working with you and really I think what drives both the book and the podcast as well as form three in general is one, we have just a natural curiosity about how new technologies can be applied in business and really helping people, mentoring business leaders to find great use cases from that technology. And I think that that curiosity and the desire to help people is what really drives us personally. Um, not to mention our friendship which has been, it's been a blast. So with that, welcome to AI first with Adam and Andy and couldn't be happier to have this be the first episode. Let's get to our, our predictions. Adam, would you, why don't you share your, your top prediction for the year. This was like a list that we kind of put together but I kind of drove it. So feel free to modify just your first prediction that you want to offer up to folks for, for 2025.
Adam Brotman: Yeah, so I would say the one that talks about AI search, I, I want to talk about AI search I feel like because I uh, if you think about the big trends in the AI space right now, one of them is agents are going to be a big deal. I think that's one of our predictions is just like, you know, you're going to see a lot more of these autonomous agents as opposed to chatbots with AI. And I actually think you're going to see companies like Apple. It's another one of our predictions. But I, but I want to roll that into a mega prediction, which is that I think AI search is going to be a specific thing that is going to capture the imagination of the mainstream consumer and, you know, human being that uses AI in a way that it hasn't yet. And I, I say that because as we're leaving 2024, I think perplexity is doing better than it's ever done. I think it's people that use it, love it, and it's becoming more and more of a prominent factor. But it's also inspiring ChatGPT to introduce ChatGPT search, which just went online, uh, officially, you know, just a few weeks ago really. And then you're seeing more and more of these AI overviews when you do a Google search. And okay, so I'm seeing a trend line as we enter 2025, as we exit 2024, towards AI search is different than regular search and different than AI prompting. It's this combination that's incredibly powerful to give you an answer and taps into these AI capabilities. And that's before you even talk about Amazon and Apple really taking advantage of it. So I, I feel like the mega trend of all these things rolls up into the fact that this concept of I'm just going to talk to AI, probably by voice mode a lot of the time, and ask it to help me figure something out, either a personal question, like what's on my calendar all the way to like true AI search. I think that that's going to be a mega trend in 2025 and it's going to really become a major use case for AI, whereas today people use AI instead of search and they kind of almost confuse the two things. I think that the proper sort of usage of AI search is going to become, uh, a big trend in 2025.
Andy Sack: Awesome. I agree with you. I think that Google's dominance in search will finally be, the monopoly of search will finally be pierced a little bit. So the first one I want to do is probably one of my most provocative ones, which is, and it's been triggered by recent, uh, events, which is
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Andy Sack: Elon Musk's power play against Sam Altman. And OpenAI is going to be successful in 2025. And what do I mean by that which is OpenAI raised $6 billion in 2024 and as part of that fundraising there was a two year time limit for Sam and OpenAI to transfer the company from its nonprofit corporate structure to a for profit corporate structure. And so the election happened. Donald Trump won. Elon Musk gained influence and power and it seems that his conflict with Sam Altman and the company, uh, he filed suit an injunction to actually slow down the transition of power. And I actually think in 2025 he's going to draw that make that transfer to of corporate structure near impossible to impossible and he's going to actually win. And as a result of that it's going to have tremendous implications to the AI large language model landscape. And I actually think X AI is going to become, is going to rise to the top of that. That's a further prediction. Microsoft is going to be affected, Google will be affected and obviously open AI. So Moss Power Play is successful. Think of it like a hockey game. And he's, it's now he's got more men on the, he's got more men on the ice.
Adam Brotman: I think that's an interesting prediction. I mean uh, put it this way. Putting aside the specifics of your prediction which I think are, are logical. I'm actually fascinated by the amazing fast rise of XAI and you know things like Grok, uh, totally on Twitter. They're and given the amount of I have my understanding, I think I read a news article, don't know if it's true that Musk is, he just raised money for extra AI I want to say at a $50 billion valuation. I think a lot of that money, if not all of us going right to Nvidia to get a bunch of create you know more of these uh, kind of supercomputer data centers and that's, that's you know I think your prediction about that, that the rise of kind of Musk powered AI platforms whether they're XAI and Grok and Tesla and Optimus from Tesla and I, I, I, I get confused between what the line is between them but I think you're seeing like an incredible rise of all of them. And to your point with more power and whatnot, like that's, that's gonna be interesting to watch in 2025.
Andy Sack: Great. What's your next one?
Adam Brotman: Well I kind of touched on it a little bit but I'll, I'll uh, come back to it which is Apple. I actually feel, I feel that if you were to list like who are the top players in AI right now. And who do you think of when you think of AI? I mean we just talked about a bunch of them. Google OpenAI XAI now kind of coming on really, really fast. Of course you think about Anthropic with Claude, you think about Meta with Llama. You don't talk about Apple.
Andy Sack: Right.
Adam Brotman: You know right now we don't talk about Apple, we don't talk that much about Amazon either. Even though they both Amazon and Apple have tremendous kind of built in advantages when it comes to AI and I think traction with AI And I'm going to predict that by this time next year at our next prediction show we should do like a prediction recap at the end of the year.
Andy Sack: We will, yeah, that's a good idea.
Adam Brotman: I think when we're doing the prediction recap you can play this video. So put it on tape. I think Apple will be a major player in the M consumer mind space of AI. And now I don't know what the definition of major player is but I'm saying like the average person is going to talk about Apple intelligence. They think of AI they say oh like when I use my iPhone to do X or Y because I just feel like having the ability to talk to your phone and have it have some kind of a small model with access to a larger model off the phone and be able to sort of access all your apps and do things for you and in a, in a semi or fully agentic way where it can like, you know, like you can book travel for you, it can book meetings for you, it can make calls, it can, it can use all your apps in theory. But the power of that is incredible. It's like life changing if it was used well. And I think Apple sits in a position where they, they only have to sort of crack a small part of that nut and they would be in an incredible position with the consumer. And I totally, I would not bet against them. I. They have time and time again proven that they're not the first to something but when they decide to do it they typically do it very well. Now that doesn't always pan out. I think Apple tried social media at one point and like uh, was it called ping? Am I remembering that right? Anyways, like, like there's been times where Apple has tried things
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Adam Brotman: and they've been in a great position but I think that when it comes to AI they're sitting in this amazing position and they don't, they don't have to, they don't have to hit the ball in the park if they just make solid contact here. I think it's going to be 2025.
Andy Sack: Is the year of Apple AI is what you're saying. And then Siri. Siri becoming. It's realizing uh, the potential that we've all been waiting for.
Adam Brotman: That's right.
Andy Sack: Yeah. That's great. I'll add one which is 2025 is going to be the. I mean we've sort of gotten a little dose, but 2025 is going to be the year of generative AI video. I think that, you know, we saw a little bit of it with open AI and we got a hint that. But that's never been made available. And I think at 25 we're going to see that breakout and, and I think the power of that and the impact of that on society, business and the individual is going to be really dramatic. So I think you're right.
Adam Brotman: Yeah, no, I mean I think you're right because it's um. I'm starting to see little bits and pieces now on my Twitter feed or my X feed, whatever you call it. Like I'll see, I'll see these videos that are clearly AI and I don't mean like they're not. They're more front of for fun, but they're just showing like they're like fake.
Andy Sack: Right.
Adam Brotman: Like these fakes that are kind of fun, kind of memified fakes. And, and the fact that like I'm starting to see that now when that becomes mainstream to your point, like where we can do a podcast episode and it, Adam and Andy and you can't tell the difference and it just goes ahead and does an episode for us or um, uh, you know, advertisements start uh, to become more prolific video ads and pre rolls and, and you have it up here. Another prediction is like the rise of the AI influencer. I think they're like, those are related.
Andy Sack: Right.
Adam Brotman: Because if you get AI video becoming a big deal in 2025, you're going to the, the downstream effect of that is what. And it's probably AI influencers and less expensive marketing and you know, a bunch of bad stuff too, like deepfakes and misinformation.
Andy Sack: Yep. Yeah. I mean I'm, I'm sort of for some reason perversely excited about the rise of synthetic influencers. Also. Synthetic bands have already taken off and so I, I think fundamentally the entire media landscape is going to be, is going to be affected by uh, by that trend. Adam, you want to cover the net this next one?
Adam Brotman: So far we've been talking about these kind of Consumer applications and bigger things that are relevant to the average person. I would say on the enterprise, I do think 2025 is the year that AI tools and AI policies and AI councils become, become table stakes for businesses. I don't think it's. We're not even close to that right now. I'm not saying by the end of 2025, I predict that it's going to have 100% coverage. But by the end of 25, I think every enterprise will either be in the middle of instituting or have already instituted some sort of an AI strategy and that the, an enterprise use of AI tools will become, will become something that everybody's talking about doing or starting to do. It won't be, it won't be 100% coverage, but right now it's like 5% or 10%. And I think by the end of 25, I think that's going to jump up to like 50%.
Andy Sack: Yeah, I mean, uh, if that were to happen, that's good news for you and I.
Adam Brotman: Right? It is our message.
Andy Sack: That's. That is why we're in this business and in some reason why we're recording this episode. So, um, I'm watching this podcast.
Adam Brotman: Am I predicting it or manifesting it? I'm not sure.
Andy Sack: Uh, both. I mean, uh, you're predicting it and manifesting it. That's right. In addition to 2025 being the year of AI video, 2025 is going to be the year of agentic AI and agents. And sort of the very twinkling beginnings of AGI are going to happen. They're going to be all over. You're going to be managing employees and agents to get your work done. You're going to be having them in your personal life and in your work life. And 2025 is the year of agentic AI.
Adam Brotman: Yeah, I think that's a good prediction. I kind of like what I said about enterprise. Like, I think it's going to be interesting when we look back at these predictions at, uh, the difference between the year that these things started to take off versus the year they became mainstream. Because we're kind of at zero on agents right now. So I think you're right. I think 2025 is going to be the year that like, the average person understands what an autonomous agent even is.
Andy Sack: Right, Totally.
Adam Brotman: And, but because there's going to be these examples and you're just going to be like, your jaw is going to drop. But, but I think it's going to be take a year or two to.
Andy Sack: Like really proliferate at the end of last year, I became late at night, I would be watching video. I became super interested in the intersection
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Andy Sack: of AI and Web three. Obviously form three has a history, um, with Web three. We're certainly familiar with it, but this whole intersection of crypto and AI and like the rise of agentic AI on crypto, I think you're going to see so that my, my prediction for the year is the intersection of Web3 and AI, uh, and how that plays out. And I think 2025 is going to be a year of the merging of those worlds. Just Al could be even more pointed. I got totally into. There's this. There's a particular token where that is completely synthetic. The synthetic agent basically posts, is surveying all of Twitter and social media and tracking because, you know, a lot of crypto is on Twitter and social and so and it's surveying all that and posting all the time and it's building audience along the way and it's a token itself. And that intersection just is I. It like. And it could. No human could post as frequently as it is with the kind of survey, market survey and data. And the fact that it's sort of feeding on itself and it's building market capitalization at the same time is just kind of mind bending.
Adam Brotman: Yeah, I, at, uh, your. At your urging, I listened to that podcast and it was like.
Andy Sack: It's kind of crazy, right?
Adam Brotman: Yeah, it was. Was a little bit like. Because we were in the middle of some of the Web3 stuff and I can imagine what it might have sounded like to someone who wasn't if we told them what we were doing. And I feel like it felt a little like that to me when I was like. I was following what they were saying. But I'm like, it's so interesting how if you don't understand AI and Web3 and someone explained to you the intersection of AI and Web3, you'd be like, what are you even talking about now? The, the thing I'll say though, just to.
Andy Sack: Perhaps we should erase that. That prediction from our prediction show because it's. It's sort of off topic and it's not quite the zone that we're going for with the pl, but whatever, whatever.
Adam Brotman: But, but al if in an effort to try and make it more, I'll call it understandable and accessible, is that you take something that's really not that understandable and easy to use, which is crypto and blockchain, and it's one of the reasons why it hasn't as a. As A application hasn't become mainstream, even though like the cryptocurrencies have become much, uh, m more mainstream. Of course, the ownership of cryptocurrency, you don't need to know how to use like a crypto wallet to own Bitcoin, right? You can own it in all these different ways. And there's an argument about whether or not you should or shouldn't. But here's the point. AI I was realizing this. AI and AI agents, like, they'll be able to do things that are complicated and difficult for the average person. So like, so let's take it away from crypto for a second. The AI agent can code, right? And it can do a data science analytics and things that you and I just couldn't do. Like, I'm not a coder and I don't know how to do, run, um, create models and stuff. I barely know how to use a spreadsheet. So the truth is that like, that's a really interesting point, isn't it? Like an AI, when you bring up the prediction about an AI agent, I just think to kind of bring it home to our audience, if we don't edit this out is that whether it be Web3 or you know, creating code or doing analytics or whatever, like when you start to think about an AI being agentic to your prediction on that and realize like, now you personally have this thing that can go figure all these things out and do all these things for you. You don't have to figure out how to code. You don't have to figure out how to use this website or do this thing or do whatever like it or uh, it can do it for you. Like then it makes you realize like, oh my God, no wonder these agents are going to be so big and be out there and they might start doing stuff for you that you would never have done for yourself in terms of like wading into, you know, different areas like blockchain or crypto. So you know, I use. I. The reason I bring it up, I was thinking about all these AI agents out there with crypto wallets and they're able to like, you know, buy tokens and sell tokens.
Andy Sack: Totally, totally.
Adam Brotman: Yeah. And I was like, oh my God, you know, that's um, that whole, by the way, that whole trend and maybe bring it home with this point. That web3AI trend came from a guy that was effectively trying to like, create like an AI simulation of Andreessen Horowitz, Right? Yeah. Uh, and so, you know, you and I have talked about like, will there be like an AI 100 fund. Should we create an AI 100 fund?
Andy Sack: Right.
Adam Brotman: So these are, you know, that could be maybe my final.
Andy Sack: Yeah, good. What's your final prediction?
Adam Brotman: My final prediction is that. That I actually think that you're going to see again, more. I think they'll start to be. This isn't on our list, but I'm just going to say it because we've talked about it. Like, I do think in 2025 you'll start to see these sort of like investment
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Adam Brotman: vehicles that are either rooted in AI or driven by, by AI in ways that we haven't seen now, because AI is so general purpose. And so we've talked about that and I think that could be another interesting prediction for 2025.
Andy Sack: Yeah. And just to add a little bit of clarity to that, when you say AI 100, what do you mean?
Adam Brotman: I think that there's going to be a way to identify AI first companies and financially. Financially.
Andy Sack: In the public markets.
Adam Brotman: Correct. And I don't.
Andy Sack: Yeah.
Adam Brotman: And I think that that's something hedge funds are going to do. And I think that like, like, because if you could, if you knew right now I've got. If I had a randomized control group and I was like, in this group there's going to be a bunch of AI first companies. In this group, there's not. Well, we've seen what happens when you do a randomized control of a group of individuals that are able and are forced to use AI and those that are not allowed to use AI. Like there's a, you look at it on a bar chart of, uh, productivity, quality and quantity and all that. And it's like, there's a clear separation, like a 40, 50%, like standards of deviation, type, step change. And, and, and, and so if you could, why wouldn't you want to try and emulate that in terms of an investment? And so there. If you could identify the top 100 companies that you could invest in that were AI first, like, in theory, they should outperform the market substantially.
Andy Sack: Yeah. Which gets to the heart of Forum 3 business, which is we're in 24. Toward the end of 24, we got incredibly clear that we are helping CEOs and C suites of, uh, midsize and large enterprises basically improve EBITDA using AI. And that is our mission and focus. And, uh, my prediction is that 2025 is our greatest year in terms of revenue growth. There's a lot of exciting things and we've become a sustainable business. That's my prediction for the year. So we've, I would say that we become the leading boutique AI first consulting company in 2025.
Adam Brotman: I love it. I'm going to take that prediction.
Andy Sack: All right. Take that. Maybe we'll be. I don't know if it's a prediction or a manifestation, but with that. Happy New Year, everyone. Super excited to be here. Thanks for joining along. Thanks for listening to our first episode of AI first with Adam and Andy. To stay updated on the latest in AI and access exclusive content, visit our website, forum3.com, subscribe to our email list and follow us on LinkedIn. We truly believe you can't over invest in AI onward.
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